with TechSoup. We call it ED Chat. Love seeing your faces, so come on on the camera, let us see your faces. I hope you're ready to take notes either with your pen and paper or on your notebook, tablet, something today because this is a hot topic that I hear a lot and it's about strategic partnership like what is strategic partnership and how do you cultivate a partnership and keep that long-term relationship. So we're gonna be talking about that in just a moment with our featured speaker. I'm Aretha Simons, the webinar producer here at TechSoup and just so you know this is being recorded so it'll be emailed to everyone who's registered within about 48 hours. Also a survey link, please fill a survey, fill in three questions and it's very important that we get this survey filled out because we want to know your topics that you would like for our summit that's coming up. Otherwise you know guys you know engage in the chat room like you always do. So our goal here is ED Chat. If this is your first time here again welcome. We are here to discuss how nonprofits and NGOs use technology, their knowledge and connections to advance your mission. So I love when you put in the chat room a connection that you have or a website that you have or a free resource that you have. So definitely engage with each other in the chat room. I need some water because my tongue is getting out already. On behalf of TechSoup and our over 100 partners that provide us hardware and software for a discount to nonprofits. For those of you who are new here today, welcome. And if you are new this is your first time here at TechSoup. Maybe someone advised you here to ED Chat. Type of one in the chat room. I would love to know. I mean all of our webinars are free and so I know a lot of people get invited from other friends. I would love to know. Oh great, Steve. Great, Pat. Awesome. Awesome. Yeah, let me know. Oh, a lot of people are typing a one in chat room. I love it. This is great. This is great. Let me know. You thought on social media. How'd you find out? Somebody advised you? I would love to know. So just so you know, for those of you who are new, please, this is how you can participate. They please stay on mute. We use the raise the hand button right there at the side of your screen to unmute yourself when you're called upon. We'll ask you to say your name, your name, your organization and try to keep your comments or questions or suggestions to a minute or two so that everyone can have a chance to speak. Otherwise, feel free to engage with each other in the chat room. So again, today is a hot topic and I know you're going to hear something from either our speaker or someone else and you might have a moment where you say, wow, I need to tweet that. I need to share that. So share on social media and then follow us on all of our social media platforms, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, follow us on all of them. Try to name all of them, but follow us. Just look for us at TechSoup. Again, just like I've been seeing new people here today, invite other people to come to ED Chat to join the conversation. I've been here from you. This is the place where you could come and let your hair down. A lot of EDs don't talk to other EDs. You're busy doing your work. So this is a place where everybody here is doing what you do. They're having some of the same struggles, some of the same challenges and successes that you do. So make sure you invite everybody to come, become a feature speaker. I love when people say, hey, you know, because I know you wear more than one hat. So you might be an expert in board of directors development. You might be an expert in so many other areas that nonprofits exist. Please let me know. Send me an email at asymons at TechSoup.org and become a feature feature speaker. Also, I want to hear some of your topics. What are the topics that you want to hear? People always ask about grant writing and fundraising, but type in the chat room some of the topics that you would like us to discuss. Again, please fill out the survey so that we'll know what topics you want to hear. At the conference, because this conference is about EDs and a lot of times you get invited to a conference and they have their own agenda. But we want to know your agenda because it's all about helping you. So let us know. OK, today, strategic partnership. Look, this is one of those requested topics. So I'm going to get right into it. I'm going to focus on the speaker today instead of giving you any more details. I'm going to introduce her to you. Chidi Colesweth, she is the founder of Donors for Africa. Look, I'm going to get it right. Donors for Africa. She's the founder and executive director. So look, she's wearing multiple hats, just like many of you. And at this global consulting firm, which is Donors for Africa Foundation, she works actively with governments, funding institution, the private sector, the philanthropic organization, NGOs and social impact leaders to break the cycle of poverty in Africa. In addition to that, I do want you to know that she was a finalist for Africa's most influential woman government in business and public service for the NGO category. Now, I know a lot of you are saying, well, she's in Africa. How is this going to help us?  She's raised over 30 million dollars in direct and indirect funding. And she's reached over 41,000 unique accounts, providing weekly knowledge on development or community development. Excuse me. So she's somebody that might know a little something, something. So, Chidi, thank you so much for being here all the way from Africa. I don't even know what time it is. It might be your bedtime, but you chose to be able to stay. So thank you. I'm going to turn it over to you and allow you to share your screen. Great. Thank you so much. I'm so grateful to be here. Thank you so much for the invitation as well. You've been super, super helpful. My name is Chidi. Like she said, I'd like to meet every single person on the call. I'm going to be sharing my screen in like another one minute or so. And basically to this conversation is just going to center around partnerships. Like she said, partnerships have one of the things we've been able to succeed at. And I think it's a common principle that cuts across our board. So whether you are in any part of the world, right? Everybody looks to secure new partnerships for the work that we do. My hope tonight is that we can take something away from today's session. Ask questions. I'll get to make a bit more about the work you all do as well as some of the work that some of the conversations that could come out of the conversation meeting we're having today. So thank you once more. Great. Now, introduction to building strategic partnerships. We all may or may not know what strategic partnerships is or are, but a strategic partner is pretty much another entity which we choose to form an agreement or a relationship with. And the essence of doing this is because we are hoping it's going to be a mutually beneficial relationship. So to this session, you know, strategic partnership is extremely broad, like in all things, I'm going to try and focus on one or two specific parts of partnership building. And we could allow the questions and answers take us further or deeper into the session. And the second part of the conversation is just going to focus on the how to. I find that a lot of times there's so much conversations about, oh, this is what I did or this is how I did it. But nobody's telling me the step by step process to take in securing that partnership. And I'm hoping we would have a good time to have that conversation tonight. Oh, it's nice, by the way. So great to simplify our conversation, right?  So first of all, there is always an attraction. Hopefully there is always an attraction. And when it comes to finding attraction or when I mean attraction, it simply means first off, you need to find businesses, government entities or organizations that your vision aligns. One of the key things I have seen in the course of my work is that sometimes nonprofits design one proposal and they are sending it to pretty much everyone who they think can give them money. And I understand I leave one myself. The process of trying to sit down to the strategy, to the thinking. Not a lot of people have time for that. Like we just want to get into the field, get the work done, bring the money who will make the impact and continue to scale up our work. But this is also a very important part of what you're finding, who you're going to get attracted to. A lot of times it's important that your vision aligns, your missions align. You want to ensure that this is someone or an organization who is funding the sort of work that you do. Now, the more times you find this organization, it could be a government agency, it could be a funding institution or a private sector company or even similar nonprofits that you're looking to scale up your work based off on their strengths. Now, the very next step to take would be to court the person or the relationship for a while. So based off of my experience, I know that people do business with people they know, like and trust. When I know you, when I like you, when I trust you, it's a step for me to put money in your pocket. But the process of knowing and liking and trust usually takes a lot of time. Sometimes what that timing is extremely important. So one of the things that I love to do is to follow or let me let me backtrack and be one of the things that I like to do is to find out who are the organizations I'm interested in. So the moment I know the organizations I'm interested in, I find out who are the key people within the organizations who have the power to take a decision on my financing. If it's in the private sector, it could be the people in communication, sponsorships, marketing, of course, those people are looking for a different sort of thing. For example, they are looking for visibility and not necessarily interested in the impact they are about to make sometimes or most of the time. What they're interested in is a return on investment, on visibility, on brand positioning, helping them look good and making them look like they are active contributors to society. So you're selling them a different story. You're trying to tell them about the reach of your project, the scale of your project, why they should come on board your project, why you have the right demographic that can target the product of services that they are putting out there. So you have to find a different story to tell an organization who is driven by sponsorship, brand positioning and visibility. At the cutting stage, something else that I really enjoy doing is getting to know the person behind the brand or getting to know the person behind the organization. So I get to know, for example, who is Aretha? What does she like? What does she enjoy doing? Has she received an award recently? Did she just publish a book? Like, I try to find out who the person behind the position is. And why is this extremely important? Sometimes I've gone as far as signing up into clubs and membership that I believe that Aretha is very interested or very passionate about, like, this is an example, by the way. You know, who I think she's very, you know, things that I think she's very interested in or passionate about. I get into the same room with her. I get to know her better. I'm not making an ask. I'm not asking for anything. I'm just getting to know the individual behind the brand. Now, the moment you're done with the cutting and it seems like you have been in this relationship for a while. So sometimes it was something as basic as commenting on their posts, inviting them to your programs and activities, aligning yourself, some of the work that they do. Just getting what aligning and making sure that you are recognizable. And then I move into the big ask. Like everything else, especially in this sort of relationships, it's very easy to go two ways. It could be a yes or a no. Oh, yes, I want to spend the rest of my life with you or no. I'm sorry. I'm not the person I'm looking to be with right now. Right. That's exactly how it works in a in a in a partnership or strategic partnership. It's important we don't assign the results of an ask to the work that we do personally. Because sometimes I have found that sometimes someone tells you, and the next day they're saying yes, because at the time they said no to you, it's probably because the organization or the funding agency isn't looking to fund work around that particular time that you are making your ask. But in a yes time, something may have happened internally. Maybe there's a change of vision. There's a change in the interest of the organization. But because I have kept up on them, I have retained a relationship. They're in my mailing list and I'm consistently in their face. It's easier for me to go back to them next year and say, hey, look, this project we had pitched last year, is this something you think you're considering on coming on board for coming on board with right? And then many at times I have gotten a yes just because I've been very persistent. And also I have also I've also explored a lot of low hanging foot when it comes to relationship building. So sometimes they don't have money to give me right. They don't have the five thousand, the ten thousand, one hundred thousand dollars to give to me. So many times I explore in kind partnerships and this is also something I would like to touch on at the end of at the start of every year as a nonprofit when you design your project or organizational project for the year. I also like to design a resource mobilization project or what I call an in kind budget. So what I mean by that is I ask for everything else that I would need to make my organization thrive. So for example, if TechStube is offering maybe some software or something that little or no cost, right, I can choose to if TechStube is not ready to give me money at this particular time. What else can they give me that they are not ready to give me money? So a lot of times what that has done for us is we established relationships and receive in kind support that is equivalent to financial support. So while the money is great, I also love when we provide nonprofits to try, try to also have in kind pitches. So at the time they're saying no to you, is there something else that I can offer them that they will say yes to? It could be employee retention time and opportunity to volunteer with the organization and opportunity to come and train, speak for partner with the program I do at no cost. And I allow you into my space and allow you to become aware of some of the programs that I do and how it can benefit the organization. Something else I did not touch on when it comes to identifying the right partner. Something I also do a lot of times that I go and research the organizations that they have funded in the past. So who have they given money to in the past? Why did they give them money? Why have they funded them three times in a row or six times in a row? I'll tell you guys they need to take it. So recent there was a conversation with a potential donor and. I heard them complaining about a particular partner they had been doing. Well, quite a lot of money they have been putting into that partnership. And they were complaining. My advantage, right, for being in that conversation at that point in time is to leverage whatever it is that they would love to see an improvement in. So, for example, one of the core things they have touched on, right? Was certain areas this other donor or previous donor or sorry, recipient or receiving donor agency wasn't willing to go into. So, for example, in my country, we have about 36 different states and they are all divided into geopolitical zones. So now in the Western states where this potential, this partner was resident. They had a lot of projects that they were implementing and they were not looking to strike into other states. But it didn't matter in person is interested in expanding the quality of work that they do into other states and into other regions. So because I was able to get into a conversation with them, no, we are not taking money away from them, but we are also helping our potential donor skin up their projects into new states. So sometimes you also want to explore conversations along those lines if they've been funding a particular organization for an extended period of time. I always love to know what the organization is doing right. And as well, sometimes you hear what they're not doing so well and I make that weakness and offer. So in this particular case, it's OK, they are resident in the West and they are not looking to expand to other states simply because they don't have the capacity to, but we are looking to expand. And I also want to touch on something else. Them funding a organization A doesn't mean that they are taking money away from organization A to one organization B. They just have more money to put into projects.  It is that aspect of your phone to go into regions or areas that this other partner doesn't have the capacity to go into. So when you explore partnership, that's really important. You look at, like I said, who have defunded in the past? Why did they fund them? What sort of projects were involved? What do I bring to the table to help them deliver their projects better? I like to see partnerships as my funder has a problem and I have the solution that they need. So I always think about partnerships from the perspective of my fund that it's really never about me. What I think about is there is a problem and I have the solution. And when I go to them, I said to them, look, I have this problem you have and this is the solution we can so far. And this is why you should be working with us. Then I bring in all the expertise and the years and the numbers and everything else that would help you say yes to my project. And it has worked every time. You know, it has worked every time. So I put yes or no simply because sometimes they would say yes. Sometimes they would say no, even when you get a no. Let that not stop you from keeping them in your pool of potential partners and consistently following through with them until you get a yes, hopefully a year, three years, three years time. Now to wrap up the conversation slowly, right? One of the things I have observed when it comes to successful partnership is that two things must exist in your nonprofit. Number one, there must be a solid work strategy for your organization. And number two, there must also be a solid perspective strategy. These are the two areas that I have found non-profits to sort of struggle in. The solid growth strategy has a lot to do with your non-profit strategy. Where are you headed? Some nonprofits have achieved their vision and you have honestly evolved into a new vision. But because many of us are not conscious of the fact that we have grown an old vision and we have come to a new vision. We end up spending so much time in this old vision, not realizing that you have actually evolved in five years, in 10 years. It just may be time to spice up the sort of programs you offer and begin to look at what people are now funding in your sector. So a solid growth strategy is important because if you don't know what they need, or rather, if you don't know where you are in your organization, then most likely you don't know what you need. I remember when I had conversations with one of our founding board members and she had said, oh, yes, we love the idea. We'd love to get a board. How much do you need? I was very quick not to say anything when it comes to money. I was like, look, you know what? We don't need your money. We just need you on board because this woman is extremely intelligent, right? And she has all this access. And I don't want you to give me money. And then you head off one year later and we have no consistent relationship. So I kept it focused on the access, on the insight and on the depth of information that she had in the sector. And that has now gone on to translate into a lot of money two, three years down the line. So a solid growth strategy is very important. And number two, a prospective strategy. And this is pretty much the law of attraction or the first part of our conversation around attraction. You must know who you're looking for. You must know who you're looking for. And it has to be deliberate. It has to be intentional. It has to be a conscious effort, because if not, what happens is you're hoping the right person will find you. You're hoping you will find the right person. So I am always, even if it's just five partners, I'm looking to achieve or looking to access every year. I keep it focused on that five. And many a times I'm usually very successful. Many a times I'm usually really successful in closing relationship with that five just because I got my perspective right. And I want to quickly move on to OK, this is just the first point of everything we discussed. Understand the organization, find the right connection, create a clear mutual goal for both organizations, address weaknesses and highlight your strengths. And of course, most importantly, define each other's goals and responsibilities. Now I want to delve into how you structure your pitch because a lot of times I get questions around. OK, so we've heard all this. How do we move from point A to point B? And these are like some practical steps will be great to take notes. First off, I make sure my subject line either on LinkedIn or via email. I make sure it is so it's something that you can't resist or something you can't help but click on and open up, right? So for example, I made some examples here. So let's say an SME expo speaking request and this is deliberate. I deliberately did not touch on money because partnership is not always is not always when it comes to money. Partnerships can be very diverse. So this is someone who is requesting to speak at a potential sponsor. And I titled it SME Expo Speaking Request in Kechi Oji. So from the moment you receive the email, you know exactly what I'm asking you for. You don't have to read four pages down to finally try and figure out what's the point she's trying to make from the title of my email. You know exactly what it is that you're looking at for. Another example I cited here is that, for example, a partnership opportunity to save your 100,000 era or $100,000 every month in your operations. If you get an email like this, you will be interested in learning how to save money in your company, in your foundation, in anything it is that you'll do it. So I always go for punchy titles so that I keep you interested and I get to open my email. Now there is a there is a statistics that say that the first two to three minutes of anyone opening your email pretty determined to go and continue to read your email. So I put my ask up front. I don't leave it to the very end of the project or the conversation or the email to tell you what I want. I come up straight. Hello, my name is Chidi Coltred. I'm reaching out to you to find out if you're looking to explore partnerships in the tech sector, in XYZ, XYZ, XYZ products. So the moment I do that, I've made my ask, I've told you exactly what I'm looking for. And then your next paragraph should be why should they care? Why should they care? So this remains a substance of your of your email. And what I like to add in this portion of my email is my track record, right? So, for example, DFA has reached well over XYZ number of people over three different communities or seven different states. We've worked with high level funding agencies or we've received funding from XYZ organization, XYZ organization, XYZ organization. This is not a time to be humble and nice and sweet. And this is why you really want to tell them why you are the preferred partner. And like I say, if you if you if you. If you've investigated the organization, if you've read your press releases, their annual reports, you would know where they are headed. And then you should be preparing a solution in this particular paragraph that it helps you get to the face. Something else I like to do sometimes is I try to be very sweet. I mean, it doesn't really have to be sweet. So, for example, congratulations. I write down the launch of your new book. You know, I have bought a copy of a book and I'm very intrigued with what you wrote about in page 17. This is something that truly interests me. Are you open to having a conversation in our maybe exclusive meeting, right? And because I have celebrated the work she has done, I have told her I have connected with the most recent achieve that she has made. The chances of getting a response is extremely high. One thing I want to encourage you to do is to do a thorough research before reaching out when we get a lot of partnership requests. People call me just so in my country, my name sounds like a guy's name, right? So you end up calling me just and I'm a sheet and I'm reading an email from someone who says yes, sir. Naturally, I'm turned off, right? So it's always great to have the name of the person who you are reaching out. There is an email platform. It's called, I think, hauntas.org or hauntas.com. I'm going to share the link. It's a platform that allows you set for pretty much anybody's email in any organization in any part of the world. As long as anyone has used that email address to log on to that platform in the past, you will be able to generate at least a format with which they write their emails within that specific organization. And then finally, when you're wrapping up your emails, I always love to leave a call to action. You read emails sometimes from potential partners and they're not telling me what next to do. So I've read about your beautiful projects. I've read about how fantastic you are in the work that you do. What next? There should always be a call to action. Do you want to meet for a meeting? Would you love to have a call? Would you like us to have an in-person meeting? Be very clear and very specific on the outcome you're looking to get from every email you sent to a potential partner or client. I must also warn you that strategic partnership is not a work in the park. Anyone who has been doing this for a while, you and I know that it takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of effort. It takes a lot of roles. But the most important thing is to be persistent and to keep pushing because eventually you will get the result that you're looking to get. And I always cite this example from Fortune 500 companies, right? There was a time I went with a website. One of these Fortune 500 companies in the UK. I went to their website. I wanted to subscribe to one of the packages they had at 10 pounds, right? It's just 10 pounds. They're making all those copies and they kept calling me and writing me emails and following up with my 10 pounds.  Are you having any difficulty? Would you like to have a meeting? I consistently received emails from a profit-making company who I just wanted to spend 10 pounds on.  I just want to encourage us to keep pushing because if they're looking for my 10 pounds and I'm not a Fortune 500 company, it means we also must press and press until we get an actual response. So just to wrap up the session or to wrap up the class, number one, research the people you want to partner with. Who are they funding? Where do you find them? And how can you communicate with them? Number two, there is a distance between what we learned and what we send out. Ensure that you capture your social impact stories. Networking is a very strong strategy. Explore networks, explore groups. I've done the craziest things. I've done gym memberships. I've done... I've enrolled in women's groups just because I was looking to get in the face of a potential partner. And like I said, 80% of the time it has worked out because I just wouldn't back now, right? Then you also want to do a lot of research on your documents, communicate your impact, publish a report, publish an impact story. We do phenomenal work, but we don't spend time telling our stories as non-profits because again, we are consistently looking to create change. And then review your documents and reward your proposal. I never send the same proposal to companies. I always, always tweak my proposals to meet the needs of every single company I am approaching. So that's really, it's a lot of work. And then most importantly, speak the language of a potential sponsor. Foundations are interested in impacts. Private sector companies are looking for brand positioning. They are looking for return on investment. They're looking for social capital. They want to look good, help them look good, right? So I think I'm pretty much done, right? But I think from this point, I will just take questions if anyone has and I'm looking to hear what anyone else has to say. Thank you guys so much. Well, thank you for your time. Thank you so much. I know that she is very passionate. Can you feel her passion? You can tell she was getting excited. But you got, you guys, that's worth it. That's why I was taking notes. But I love your passion. Thank you for sharing your knowledge today. And I know there's gotta be some questions because this is something that if you haven't done, you will have to do. You will have to woo somebody, court somebody, propose to somebody to have that strategic partnership. Look, everybody's saying amazing conversation. Lots of thank yous in the chat room. Yes, give her her props.  And this is what I love too about tech to being a worldwide organization. We have partners or members in all different countries. So, Chidi, that was really, really super, super amazing. So I want to open it up. Please use your, raise your hand button to ask any questions. And Chidi, if you can take your screen down, that would be great. I got lots of notes. I do want to recognize somebody. How about somebody send me a note one second? I'm gonna go back to her. Oh, before I do that, the seeds of life, Rishwana, Rishwana, I love you.  I love you. Thank you so much. You're welcome. Oh, so you're here. You're here with us. Great. You have the seed of life foundation. So you definitely need to connect with Chidi. Tell us about your organization in like one minute, please. Okay. This is Rishwana. I represent the seed of life foundation. We provide education and major based education to underprivileged communities in orphanages in Africa.  And unfortunately after COVID-19, we are one of the few organizations that provide them this kind of opportunity. Please do visit our social medias. If you have any questions, feel free to give me a call. And yes, I would like to connect with donors for Africa because that's where we are. And we wanna be there when we can do something. It's a global phenomenon we're facing right now. That is great. Type your information in the chat room. And Rishwana, email me, asymonsatetsu.org and I'll connect you and Chidi because I follow her on social media. You don't follow people on social media unless you really wanna follow them. So I follow them and I'm amazed at what they do.  I've been learning a lot. Anyone have any questions for Chidi or comments that you would like to come live to make? Someone wants to know, share your website. Can you share your website and what city she's located in? Is this with Rishwana or Chidi? Both of you share your websites, please. So any questions? Who has had a successful strategic partnership and let us know what you accomplished besides Chidi? Because we know Chidi has done it. Good, Ginger, I cannot hear you though. You can't see me? I think I got you now, great, perfect. Okay, hi. Hello everyone. I'm Hi, Chidi, great presentation, thank you. Well, our organization does have a couple of great partnerships. The organization is the Sickle Cell Thalassemia Patients Network, 32 years old, actually older than that. It started as an adult support group about 35 years ago and serves individuals and families living with sickle cell disease and other inherited blood disorders. And the first partnerships were with the doctors who cared for the population in the hospitals. We've worked in about 18 hospitals throughout New York City on grant-funded programs to provide coordination of care. Now we're doing two care coordination for adults and transitioned for young adults moving out of pediatrics into adult care and we're expanding in hospitals starting this year. And now we've been trying to when I getting successful now and bringing together the other sickle cell organizations in the state to work collaboratively and we've been doing that through political advocacy. So we've gotten the other organization in about 32 people throughout the state to work with us to advocate for a Sickle Cell Treatment and Surveillance Act in New York. And, you know, I'm very interested in putting the chat I really want to learn more about private public partnerships because I was at the World Orphan Drug Conference two weeks ago and they were talking about that. But, you know, as she did the how to, you know the how to do that, we do have sponsorships from pharmaceuticals but it's not the same as having a partnership. You know, we're getting money but we would like to have more interactions, you know, employee volunteers, membership on our advisory board, things like that because we want to build, especially in the way of technology to do, you know, new things in the organization and expand the work that we're doing. Wow, Cheney, you wanna have any comments for her? Because I have some comments for you, Jinder. Do you have any comments for Jinder?  I heard a lot of things. First of all, I do wanna say I see your background on Sickle Cell and I know people, the small nonprofits are, you look at larger nonprofits like, well, they're a big nonprofit, you know so they're gonna get to the department but they've been doing the work for 30 years. So sometimes I'm not saying it's gonna take 30 years but sometimes it take consistency and you hanging in there. And then she mentioned her struggles. So even large organizations have trouble. She mentioned boards, she mentioned, you know, getting help. So even large organizations have struggles. I just wanna say that.  They getting all the money they're getting all the help. But all of us are in the same boat and that is why we're here. So Chidi, did you wanna add anything to that? No, you pretty much said it's all right. It takes time. Like I would always like to say it takes time. It's not something that can get done in a split second except you're really lucky because sometimes those things happen. You're just at the right place at the right time and you're the right person.  You're searching for someone like you and it just clicks, right? But many a times when such things don't happen you just need to go through the process and trust the process, you know and just hang in there to finally something clicks. And interestingly, the moment you're able to close one partner. It's almost like everyone else is waiting for one person to take a risk on you and then other people are now much more, oh, okay, okay, okay, they didn't crumble. Let's get into the boat. And then it becomes a lot easier. That was powerful. That was powerful. Somebody else maybe watching, everybody's watching you but somebody may be waiting for someone else to take a risk on you and then they may, you know just come aboard. I'm gonna go to the chat room and there's a couple of questions here from Marian. How do you keep in touch with partners and potential future partners that said no? Okay, so I love emails a lot. So I do have a newsletter and email newsletter. This is someone that I talked to that. So I use a lot of newsletters and in your newsletters as a way I segment my newsletter signups, right? And I have them listed as potentials in my newsletter signup in my whatever that's called, right? And what I do is that I send once in a month just updates on the work that we're doing. And the specific update I sent to that group are partner related updates. So for example, oh, DFA recently launched a partnership with TechSoup and I will tell you how we are helping TechSoup achieve their goal, right? And those are the sort of information that I share with those potential partners. Now why I do that is because people leave organizations. So maybe while you get a text you couldn't come on board my project but then you go into development then or some other organization and then you begin to see some synergies and it's easier for you to remember there's this person you always get an email from once a month. So I would just say have a filing system where you have everyone's email and then once a month communicate specific partnership related news and stories with that particular sector. So that it can see how you're doing fantastic work with other people and would love to do some work with you as well. Wow, that was priceless and you got it for free today. Woo, that was priceless. Separate emails, because I never thought of that. That's priceless.  Put a one in the chat room if you have separate email. Yeah, Mrs. Spetsch was like, nope, not doing that. Yeah, I mean, that's priceless. That's, we need to adopt that too. Okay, Stephanie. No, I'm sorry, Lauren, I skip your question. How can social impact structures, excuse me, startups work towards strategic partnership in the early stages of the organizational development? Very good question. You have to start from what you need. I always recommend for startups always start from what you need. So what do you need right now? And it has to be an honest evaluation, right? And don't think about money because everybody say, oh, funding, no. Look at it objectively, right, from the outside. What do you need right now as a growing startup? I've traded visibility with brand organizers. For example, there was an organization who was really great at branding and brand positioning and all those brand detailing, right? And at that time, we couldn't afford to pay all this huge amount of money for all the branding that comes with it. It's a small nonprofit then, but it was a small nonprofit. So what we did was to have conversations with the founders and then we realized that a lot of, they've been looking to launch some airline related foundation that had to do with getting more women into the airline industry and things like that. So we offered them at no cost the strategy, the setup, everything that what we got in return was branding and brand positioning and all those things that we could not afford to pay for. So you always need to look at what do I need? When you look at what you need, then it's easier for you to not begin to approach and it's called resource mobilization. You begin to approach your partners from the perspective of resource mobilization. What can I get for work like a break by butter? Wow, another priceless gem. Thank you so much. Stephanie said, Chidi, how may I, excuse me, I missed at the beginning, but is your outline approach for contact of strategic partners mainly cold outreach or also from warm leads? It's actually a combination of two. And I will say because when we first started, we relied a lot on referrals because we're doing so much work, like so much good work with one partner. They refer you to another partner.  So then we began to take the cold calling. So that's where you do the prospecting, do the short listing, you find potential partners. And if you wanna ask me, where can I find my potential partner? Find who is funding organization like yours. They are your potential partner. So all we now do is find those people and then begin to cold call. This is where we are now preparing proposals, reaching out, asking for meetings, sometimes getting a response, sometimes not getting a response, asking for people who know people within the organizations, right? So if you have a friend who works here, can I have a conversation with her? And then Sheena tells you who is the right person to send an email to. Sometimes it's the front desk officer and not the CEO. It's really just very tricky. You begin to hear all these interesting stories and uniqueness.  If you do a cold, if you send it in the post mail, nobody will respond to it. So having those conversations, like getting to know through cold calling, it also makes you very proactive and you're not waiting for something to happen before you close your contractions. So it's a combination of both. That's good, that's good. Phoebe said, my email list is cold and warm. What should I do to make the cold list warm and the warm list hot? That's a good one. That's a really good question. What do you do to make the cold list warm? What's had them up, right? See if you can have a potential partner hangout. It could be over. Like I always find something of interest. See if you could invite them to maybe come for your, one of your special events, right? See if it's something they may be interested in. I don't recommend offering gifts, because then it think it will always appear as if you're trying to maybe buy favors. So I always try to invite them or bring them into my space or goes through people who know them to get into their space. Sometimes I've actually gotten on board whole projects. So what I mean by that is, if they funded another organization, I go and partner with that organization, right? And sometimes the partnership is that, I'm not expecting money in return. It could be, oh, we'll be happy to help you put up your pliers or we'll be happy to help you deliver a session or we'll be happy to help you do XYZ because my potential partner or donor is their current donor and partner. So like I said, people do business with people they know, like and trust. And the trick is to get them to at least know you. So if they funded GINGER STPN in the past, what projects can I work with GINGER on, for example, that allows me to be in the same space with my potential donor? Because then they can make the connection or see me with GINGER's event. Oh, yes, we've partnered on XYZ project together. And then that way, there's an easier entry, what I call it's entry level or entry way to make the conversation along smooth side. Awesome, thank you. Shoretta said great information. Thank you for sharing these partnerships. And I guess hi, Shoretta. Janice said, you mentioned a way to research email addresses. Can you expound on that? Yes, so if I don't find it right away, I have sometimes I just want to do things immediately. If I don't find it right away, I'm going to send it to Aretha. But it's a link, it's a link of, there's some link that you include in if you're searching for the email addresses of people. I mean, if you don't want to ask directly and you feel like you've asked back where I'm from, right here, it's not people don't just give you their email addresses, it's always very difficult to find. Except to go on LinkedIn and you make it direct ask. And that's another thing, please guys explore LinkedIn. It's a phenomenal platform for non-profits. Like a lot of the partners I have gotten in front of their case, it was via LinkedIn. Because I followed them, I knew how LinkedIn is, as you engage on their post more, your feed is popping up on their feed, their feed is popping up on yours. So aside from LinkedIn, I'm going to try and find out that particular link and I'll send it to you Aretha. So I don't keep us too long on the call, but I promise to send it to you too. Okay, great, great. This has been fantastic. That was a good nugget too. You've been noticing how social media is making, like if you like somebody else's than other, it's just amazing how it goes around. Any questions, any hands raised? I had the screen where I can only see the faces of people whose faces were on. And I don't know if I missed any hands being raised here in the other room. No other questions. Can we give some snaps for Chidi all the way from Africa? Thank you so much, girl. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you. Amazing, amazing. So I'm going to put the link to the survey here once again, it's very important that you fill out the survey. It will help us to decide which topics that you want to hear. I want to know if there are any pastors or leaders in the faith-based arena, stick around with me. I'm going to stop recording for just a moment, stick around me, because I want to have a special conversation with you. Give me five minutes of your time. I always tell you, make sure that you take care of yourself because I know you've been busy taking care of other people. So please make sure you take care of yourself. Chidi, thank you, thank you so much. Have a great day, everybody. Thank you guys, bye.


Today, we want to share with you our learning using OpenTelemetry to monitor GraphQL queries in production. And our SREs and developers can best work together to troubleshoot these issues. For this talk, Ahmet is going to represent the developer side of things. And I'm going to represent the operation side of things. So I am responsible to make sure that everything runs smoothly in production. But these developers, they keep coming up with new technologies, introducing new problems and complexity in production. It gets very overwhelming. And today, Ahmet, he wants to push a new release to production using GraphQL. Hey, Ahmet, why do you even want to use GraphQL? Like, what is that thing? Well, as SREs, you've probably heard about GraphQL. Your development teams might be thinking about using it, or you've started adopting it, but might not be fully up to speed on the pros, the cons, the nuances of GraphQL, or even what it's useful for. So over the next few minutes, we'll just go through a quick introduction to make sure you've got enough information to understand what we're going to be dealing with. SQL, as I'm sure we all know, is a query language that's used to manage and manipulate data in a database. It allows you to access many records with a single declarative query and introduces the concept of accessing records by some key. Operations that can be performed on data within a database include select, insert, update, and delete. And with a single query, we can access data across multiple tables using a join. So these concepts, they made their way into REST, which allows us access to resources using different HTTP methods, like get, post, put, and delete. But to access those specific resource or nested resources, you need to do so via different endpoint URLs. You can't perform joins using REST. To me, GraphQL takes ideas that were originally developed to query databases and applies them to the wider internet so that we can expose them as an API. A single GraphQL query can return connected data. Like SQL, you can use GraphQL queries to change or remove data, too. But unlike SQL, though, rather than just querying data stored in a database table, GraphQL is a bit more general purpose. Data can and does reside almost anywhere. A database across multiple databases, different file systems, other REST, GRPC, SOAP services, and even event-based systems like Kafka. So just like SQL is a declarative query language for databases, GraphQL is a declarative query language for the internet. OK, this sounds cool. OK, but why do we need GraphQL? You know, what problem does it solve? And isn't REST good enough? Well, in the above three requests, SQL, REST, and GraphQL, they're all roughly equivalent. We need to get all the posts which have been published and also to find out the author's name in order to populate the front end for a new page in a blog site. We just need two properties from authors, ID and name, and three properties from posts, title, author ID, and status. So overfetching is simply when an API request returns far too much data that you're not going to use. With REST, we get back the entire resource, so we end up overfetching from the API, and this can be really inefficient, especially for large resources with list-based responses. My REST API call queried all the posts with the published status, but still gets back too much information. All I need is the post title and the author ID. Underfetching is when an API call doesn't have enough data that it necessitates extra calls to enrich that data. I might need multiple entities at one time, and if each request is underfetching the data that we want, we need to perform several round trips to the server to build our required data model. So in the same example, I got back the author IDs, and now I need to request each author endpoint in order to obtain the author name. That's a lot of call wasted bandwidth, added latency, and pain for the end users. Every additional API calls add precious latency to each interaction, increasing the response time, and adds a lot of complexity for our customers to integrate with us. Boom, you got it. So now that you know a little bit about what kind of problems that GraphQL solves, let's take a look at what GraphQL looks like. We can see an example schema, a query operation, and an example response. You'll see that when you query the API, your GraphQL requests syntax conveniently mirrors the shape of the JSON that you'd expect in the response. For API consumers, they can request exactly the data that they need with absolute flexibility so that they know exactly what data is going to be returned. Nothing more, nothing less. And for API producers, they can define their schema and write some clever code, or do it declaratively with a tool like Tyche, to dynamically resolve those requests. Because we've got a shared schema for both producers and consumers, we get the benefit of being able to scaffold and generate both server stubs and type safe clients too, just like with GRPC. Okay, I get it. That sounds interesting. Tell me more about the service you're about to push to production. Like what do I need to know about it? So let's move away from our contrived blog example for a moment and start talking about a contrived travel business. If you can imagine that every type in GraphQL might be represented by a microservice, we could think of GraphQL as an ingress which can conveniently expose those microservices as a combined, purposefully designed API product. We've got three different microservices here, a country service, image service, and a weather service. And a GraphQL schema, which neatly provides an API product for these microservices. In the simplest of use case, I just have one client, which happens to be an internal React app for our website. Given that the React app is an internal consumer of our KubeTravel service, our dev team will probably reach out via Slack if something isn't working quite right. But in reality, if we just have one consumer, GraphQL is probably a little bit overboard. Given that KubeTravel is an API product, there might be a whole slew of different apps, different consumer types built by different developers from internal through to partners, even the general public, building against our GraphQL API and even publishing back to our API marketplace. If something goes wrong, we need to know about it because our users aren't going to be so forgiving. Okay, so another question, right? How do we monitor GraphQL to production? Let's try to apply the red method. As a reminder, the red method is a monitoring strategy used to gain insight into the health and performance of distributed systems. Red stands for rate, the number of requests per second, your service are serving errors, the number of failed requests per second, and duration, how long each request takes. And based on this metrics, you can understand how good your service is doing and set up your SLO, alerting, and everything that you need. So how are we going to do that with our application? The first step is to instrument our GraphQL service with OpenTelemetry to get distributed traces. Now, there are different implementation of GraphQL available on the market, including tags implementation, but here we are going to use a Node.js implementation of GraphQL using a Node.js with the Express framework. Okay, so let's take a look if there's already an instrumentation for OpenTelemetry that is available for Node.js and GraphQL. We can go to the OpenTelemetry website and on the ecosystem, you can have a look at all the instrumentation that are available. And if we search for GraphQL, we see, oh, we're lucky there is already an instrumentation library for GraphQL Node.js. So this is what we are going to use in this presentation. In Node.js, we can use a trace.js file to instrument our service with OpenTelemetry, like you see here. And this is where we add our instrumentation. So this is where we added a GraphQL instrumentation to the list of the HTTP instrumentation and Express instrumentation that we were already using. And if you look at the code, you will notice that we're exporting the spans to an OpenTelemetry collector. And here's the result. So we have an end-to-end distributed traces in Yeager. We can see tags API gateways starting the transaction, reporting some spans. Then we see the GraphQL service also reporting its spans. And finally, the GraphQL service is calling a REST service, which is also instrumented, and we get also the span. So the end-to-end distributed traces is now available in Yeager. Okay, we have tracing in place, but to monitor in production, we need some metrics. The red metrics that we talked earlier, so how do we get from the traces to those red metrics? Well, Yeager has an out-of-the-box integration for red metrics. It uses a component on the OpenTelemetry collector called span-metrics connector, or previously called span-metrics processor. And it generates the metrics based on the span. The span-metrics connector creates two metrics based on the span. The calls total, which is the number of spans, including error spans, so the error identified as a time series with a label status code, and the latency, which is reported as histogram. And those metrics are then stored in parameters, and Yeager is able to connect to parameters to display those metrics. And here's the result. In Yeager, so there is the monitor tab when this is set up, and I have now my request rate, error rate, and duration for my GraphQL service. Hey, that's good, right? Like, I'm ready to monitor this in production. What do you think? What could go wrong? So let's start to look at two different error scenarios involving GraphQL queries. Hubstream and resolver errors. I'm gonna send a request to get some information from Italy, along with its weather data, but it's not working. Are you able to detect those kinds of issues? Let's check. Okay, let's try this out. Yes, you see, I see an increased error rate here on my dashboard. Let's check the traces to understand the issue. I can find the traces with error in Yeager by filtering them using the error tag and looking at those traces that have errors. I can quickly catch that the GraphQL service is returning a 500 HTTP error code because the weather service, it was calling return of 400 error status code. So in that example, I get all the information I need from open telemetry. And take a look. I can even check out which query is having the issue. So having a look at the errors and then I have the query, so you can fix it. Okay, I fixed the bug. Let's try again. An error with the temperature not being shown in the customer app. Okay, let's try again. Let me check. Let's check the traces. No, no error, all good. Can you maybe try to reproduce it? Look, Sonya, my error is in the response body. Here it is. GraphQL errors are fundamentally different from REST API errors. We can't rely on the HTTP status codes and status texts. According to the spec, the response of a GraphQL endpoint should contain either a data field or an errors field. And in some cases, both. In this particular case, we can see that the error object returned is an array and it contains the following fields, a message and locations. So the message represents the actual error message and the locations contains the line and the column and the location of the query. So what can we do to catch these kinds of errors? Okay, so right now we are missing this error information on our spans and maybe let's take a look at open telemetry semantic convention to see if there's an attribute we can use for that. The semantic conventions are a set of recommended attributes for different technologies. It's not mandatory to use them, but it's recommended and it's useful to process the information on the observability backend. And each and every instrumentation libraries are then responsible for implementing them. And we can see here in the semantic convention from GraphQL that it contains only a couple of attributes. So the operation name, the type and the document, but there's nothing specific about GraphQL errors. So let's add it by ourselves. So with this code, we are adding an additional spans that will report the error with our own attribute called GraphQL error message with the instrumentation. And if we do that and have run into the same error, we can see the error being recorded on the span. You have to notice it's not the first span because the first span that's come is still the one that gets traced by the HTTP layer and this one says, okay, 200 error codes, everything's fine, but at least we can start logging our GraphQL errors and we can report it. And still in Yeager, the error rate diagram doesn't change because it's based on the first spans that comes, but we can use parameters and add custom queries to retrieve the error rate for the GraphQL queries based on the manual instrumentation that we have added. So what we have learned here is GraphQL error detection doesn't work like a standard waste API and we need more logic around it. We solve that by adding a GraphQL error attribute in our instrumentation, but that's something that could be added to the instrumentation library down the line. So we have spoken about errors, but what about performance issue? Can we use the open telemetry data in Yeager to detect performance issue? So Ahmed, this is what I have. What do you think? Is it good enough for performance? All the different queries that are being sent to my GraphQL server are being aggregated by the slash GraphQL endpoint. Yeah, because they're all sending to GraphQL endpoint. So yes, what's wrong with that? It's not that easy with GraphQL. We don't know what queries clients are sending us. One client can send multiple different queries and we could have multiple clients consuming this API, each in their weird and wonderful way. So each client might have a different performance profile on a per query basis. And whilst one client could experience performance problems, another client could be performing perfectly fine. It's all about the type of query and the resolvers. Like with databases, right? Yes, but we have the added complexity because you wouldn't expose your SQL database to your APOI consumers, would you? So if we go back to that screen, the P95 latency doesn't really mean anything because it's an average over every single GraphQL query that it's sent to the server. We need more granularity. Also, Sonja, there's a couple of things you need to know about performance. We'll touch on a couple of them from the N plus one problem to cyclic queries. Complex and deeply nested queries can also impact performance. One of the most commonly used features of GraphQL is the ability to get nested data within a single server request. Unfortunately, it's very easy to misconfigure the way that the data loading in a way which won't scale as the data grows. And in this example, you can see what looks like a pretty harmless query which requests the continents in the world and then for each continent to go grab the countries and then for each country get some weather data. You know what? I think using open telemetry, we can detect that. So you can nicely detect N plus one query. Let me show you. So in this particular example, in Yeager, when looking at the trace diagram, we can see 27 HTTP get calls made to the weather service from one single GraphQL query. Of course, I would expect this kind of query to work pretty well on the development side, on your machine, but in production, this kind of query that will not scale. So we need to be able to catch them. One thing that we could do is get that number in parameters, for example, getting the average number of outgoing requests per GraphQL query. And you can even use it to set alerts in test or in production environment. Very cool. So cyclic queries, they reuse the same object one or more times in a cyclical manner. So despite being pretty unusual, I mean, why would anybody actually want to grab all the continents, then for each continent, grab the countries, then dive back into the continent of that country and so on. So this could either be done in error, but more likely as a potential vulnerability for GraphQL APIs. And they need to be protected as they can lead to a denial of service. And some queries, they're easier for a server to resolve than others. The depth of a query is the number of nesting levels. So in this example, we've got a query depth of three, ABC. And the complexity of a query is typically defined by the number of fields that have been requested. So in this example to the right, you'll see an example query with a complexity of six. It's also possible to assign custom complexity values on a per field basis. So we can assume that queries with a higher depth and higher complexity are going to be more expensive for a server to resolve than simpler queries. And as such, add precious latency. Okay, let's try to see what we can do better to track the performance of a GraphQL service. Again, we need to check what information we have on our spans. And here we see we have the full query and the field names. Actually, this doesn't really match the semantic convention we have seen earlier. So we see that here we have different libraries using something else than the semantic convention. But still, we can leverage the attribute that we have on our span to report new sets of metrics. So let's update our open telemetric collector configuration to add those attributes we get as metric dimension to report on the metrics for the number of calls and the latency, so the red metrics that we get with this change that are getting new dimension for GraphQL source, which is the query field name, field path. And here you go. So we could group them by unique queries. What do you think? I guess this could work, but I mean, if we've got an API product, we're simply gonna have too many similar looking queries that are all different. And it's gonna be very difficult to get any kind of useful information. Could there be any better way to group them? Okay, let's try to think about something else. Let's look again back at the open telemetric semantic convention to see if there's an attribute we could use for that. And maybe in the future, we could help contribute it to our library, to the instrumentation library to fix that. So we have again those three fields, the operation name, operation type, if this is a query, a mutation or subscription, and the query itself. So what if we grouped the query performance by the operation type and name, what do you think? Hmm, that's much better. But at the same time, we still lost a lot of detail. For example, in query continents, we've got an average response time of 2.4 seconds. Is this because most queries are deeply nested? So maybe, maybe we could try adding the clients, the client identification. So for each group of operation name and type, maybe we could add the identification to the client that is making to the call. So you would know if a mobile client is sending more complex queries and where you should look in particular. I guess that might work, but I guess it's very much dependent on the client's specific query and those kind of workloads. I think we need to explore this further with the community. What do you guys think? So we are almost at the end of our talk and let's summarize what we have learned so far. Um, back. Sorry. Thank you. Yeah. So, open telemetry is helpful for monitoring and troubleshooting GraphQL queries in production, but there are still a couple of things we need to improve together. The first one is the semantic convention. So you have seen there is a definition and some library don't use it and would be super helpful to have all the libraries using the same level of semantic convention. And also we are missing here a definition for GraphQL errors because you have seen that GraphQL doesn't work at the same level as a standard HTTP call. So we would need additional attribute information to understand what's happening in GraphQL. It's necessary, it's required to understand if there was an error to be able to catch them. But also if you think about error-based sampling where you just get a certain amount of traces, you want to make sure that you capture all the errors. So you would need to have a kind of attribute to be able to get the GraphQL errors. And also the red method of monitoring for GraphQL is useful, but needs to be extended to GraphQL specifics. And those specifics are query type, operation name, query depth, maybe query depth, maybe query complexity. And it also kind of depend on the workload that you are using. If you're having different clients or just one and who is making call to your GraphQL service. And using OpenTelemetry in production, the operation team now has all the visibility they need to ensure the reliability of the system. So thank you very much. Let us know if you've got any questions either now or online using this QR code. And also a copy of our slide decks available via that QR code if you want to take it. And we've got the best stickers which are special edition just for KubeCon. So make sure you grab some on your way out. Thank you.


I've run into Michael Johnson of Appler and I've heard a lot of great stuff about this application and website service and I'd like to have you tell us about it. Yeah so Appler it's at getappler.com G-E-T-A-P-P-L-R it's a website so it's a web app it's not something that you download so you can just go there and visit it right away but what it is is a social app discovery so... Wait iTunes is perfect for for app discovery isn't it? You know what it really isn't actually and I and many other people have realized this over the years you know you look at the homepage of iTunes and it's a lot of stuff that isn't relevant to a lot of people certainly. So newest and most downloaded that isn't the way we should find our apps? No I don't think so honestly most of the great apps that I found almost all the ones that I use on a daily basis I found because my friends told me about them yeah yeah that's absolutely right and and so when I created this thing I wanted to take that social experience that of finding apps from my friends or recommending apps to my friends because you know when you find something cool you're like oh man I know this one person who would love this or I know everybody would love this and it's always fun to to let people know so I wanted to take that experience and turn it into a social network for people to enjoy online en masse. So this is iOS specific how does it work? So you go to getappler.com you sign up and what happens is it walks you through a couple step process of pulling in all the apps that you've ever purchased and then you can go through with one click on each one you can give it essentially a thumbs up or a thumbs down whether you would recommend it to somebody or whether you wouldn't and then optionally leaving a little review it doesn't have to be very long and a lot of times you don't have to leave a review at all because you know it's it's just something pretty quick and easy you you like it. So it's just like or don't like not a five star or anything like that? Exactly yeah I found that the the star ratings were everybody gives one or five anyway. Yeah they're too arbitrary if you're if you're doing anything but one or five. Yeah that's true so you mentioned being able to see what apps I have on my phone we talked a little bit about this earlier how does that work? Yeah so what you do is you can sign in with your Apple ID and password and we don't save that information on the servers or anywhere and if you don't want to do that if you're not comfortable with that you can of course not do that and find the apps individually but if you are comfortable with doing that it's great because it just shows them all to you right there you you know click yes no on all of them and then you can start following the people that you either know about or are friends with in real life and get those applications the recommendations from them in your activity feed it's kind of like Twitter you it's a follow model and then you you get an aggregate feed of all those people you follow. Okay so like if I'm find that Paul Shadwell always likes the same kind of apps that I like I would follow him and then I could see what kind of stuff he thought was cool. Exactly and so not only do you get that activity feed so the you know minute by minute of what people are recommending but it also takes an aggregate of all that stuff and creates your own top apps that you should check out sort of like what iTunes does but based on what you have interest in but not only that because it knows the apps that you already have it just subtracts those from the top apps because you don't want to be looking at something that you already have. But it would figure out for example I like utilities and I don't care about games it wouldn't show me a bunch of games. Well exactly yeah you can filter down in any any position that you want so if you're on the activity page or if you're on a person's specific profile page or looking at someone's entire app library you can always filter down to the stuff that you want to see so if you only want to see stuff that's free utility for your iPad then you can just punch those things in and then you'll only see that. Oh that sounds fantastic so is there any cost to the user for this? Absolutely not it's totally free and you can go there and check it out on your phone or on your computer it works either way or on your iPad it has optimized versions on all those devices and it's getappler.com. So to be specific it's iOS though you can access the iOS apps through your Mac. Correct yes you can go on your Mac and look at the iOS apps we want to do Mac apps coming soon it's it'll be a pretty easy process for us because it's essentially the same thing store yeah exactly all right great thank you very much Michael this is uh this has been a lot of fun let's check it out at getappler.com thank you


With the now very distant announcement of Dragon Ball Z, Budokai Tengaiji 4 actually being real, we've gone back to Budokai Tengaiji 3 with mods to take on some of the characters we're most excited to see in that new game, whenever it is re- Ah! Ah! Ah! That's a B-Mix? B-Mix?  Can we please just go Goku and Vegeta for round 1? Please, trust me. Okay, alright, alright, alright, we can do Goku and Vegeta. I need this, bro. You can't talk me out of this. I want outfit 1. I was gonna say, I was gonna say, we can choose each other's characters, you know, at that point. You also probably saw me hovering over Chow Tzu, and you probably panicked. Yeah, you know, I saw Chow Tzu, I panicked, I just needed one round of Goku and Vegeta because, you know, it's stage 1. We don't even have to take this super seriously yet. Give me a bright stage. I know, how about random? Alright, well, this could be very bad. Oh, go on minigame. Come on, bro, help me get these swords. Okay, if you go for a sex, it's not gonna work because we are on the same course. Bro, it's kinda like we're back in the day, bro. Did Mom make pizza rolls? Why he walked enough like that?  You know what I'm talking about the way they walk a lot? Here's another question for you, Duddle. When you look at Hit's head, what's the first thing you think about? Bro, I think about how I'm gonna dent it right now, but I know where you're getting at. I know, I know where you're trying to give me this. Oh, he's trying to shoot me if that rock wasn't it.  Kyle can't come at me. I'm a big starter. I'm Goku blue out here. There's no way he counters everything. Did you see the way he did this? I think he dipped in his head. I did, bro. That's what I told you. I told you my plan. Alright, here's my, bro. Well, why are you GT Super Saiyan God Vegeta? Bro, I didn't. You actually looking good.   It actually kind of fits the red hair.    Oh, win that. That's a lot. Come on, man. You're our mashing expert. If you can't win, I'm getting scared already. You know how broken he is? I get that, but I need you to win regardless.  I did. I stunned him. I stunned him. Orga Blaster again, backhand. Oh, you have the hair. What's at your head? And one more beam. I'm liking the beam. Gallic gun with one hand, bro's different. What I'm saying, he can't stop. I think just you alone have tied it. Well, actually, he took the health lead now. But if you get it down, we're going to start seeing yellow pretty fast. You know what? I want to go blue. Bluer. No way. Super Saiyan blue evolved. It barely looks different on this form. Oh, you want to go full power? Oh, yeah. I'll challenge you. You're challenging that. You lost the first mash off and then you thought you'd do it again. What are you thinking? Why is he better now? Bro, I don't know, but he's crazy. Fight back. Oh, he stomped on your neck. Bro, did you and like how Vegeta did Burner? Help. Oh, my God, bro. I'm trying, but you got to tag in. There's not much I can do on the back. I'm going to miss. I actually did hit. I'm crazy. Destroyed our entire earth. I'm going crazy. Hey. Oh, my God. How did he back dash my full speed?  That was the worst health spend ever. That was the worst.  He launched me into that rocket. Mach speed. Bro, he even the game so quick. Bro, he is aggressive. What happened? He is, bro. What is with this guy? Was it something that Vegeta said? Oh, no, you won. I don't know. I can't. That is not making it there in time. That is not going to hit. That is a huge miss. What did you do? I'm firing it anyway. Nice. Oh, God. Bro, did you see my? Whoa. Help. No, no, no, no. I'm going to do it again, bro. I'm going to do it. He's firing up. Why did he gently fly up? What do you like that?  Oh, brother. I was already getting up. It's fine. All right.  What? What? Stop wasting your health, man. It never works. Rime, this is for you.  Say goodbye to your health, Barthit. This is everything, Vegeta. I leave it to you. Die. Oh, wow. That crane kick. That was crazy. Hold on. I got my friend died. Wow. You consider me that good of a friend that got you a buff when he surpassed the gods.  Let's go. Final explosion. There's no way he dodges it, surely. He would have to be cracked. Yeah. Yeah, no. I told you I'll avenge you. You won. I told you I'll avenge you. We beat stage one. We're going on to stage two. That was actually DOP accurate, by the way. At what cost? My bestie died. My bestie died? If Vegeta ever said that, I think they should cancel the show. All right. We're going on to stage two and run. I actually liked your idea about picking each other's characters. Do you want to go first?  All right, good. That's kind of what I meant is do you want me to pick your character first? I know you, bro. I'm going to pick the character that I think gives off the most you energy. All right. All right. The most you character is easily, bro, and I think you're going to consider this a compliment. I'm not going to lie.  What does that even mean?  What do you give off? Hold on. Yeah, go ahead, bro. You know what? How about this? How about you close your eyes for this one? All right. I'll close my eyes. I'll close my eyes. That's the part where I tell you not to look at the thing, but you'll obviously see it. Yeah, I'm instantly going to look up and see what you gave me, by the way. Hi, Snowman. Oh, he's smiling. I feel like I picked the perfect character for you. Really? I'm interested in seeing what you think I look like in Dread. Dr. Willow? Yeah. Guess what about Big Brain? Oh, so you're saying you're seeing me for my brains. I get it. Oh, boy. Hold on. Big Brain? Yeah. It's coming. I don't know. I don't know what you're talking about. Zamasu, big guard like that. Think of me. Scatter figure beam. Yeah, bro. He's getting cooked. All right. Damn. Bro, you're getting. No, no. Nice vanish, actually. This is why I gave you Zamasu because I felt like you were just different with him. You know what?  Watch this. But I dare you. Oh, yeah.  No way. Oh, it's a rush. It's a version. Two, three. Three, three. What? And three, four he won. What? Damn it, man. That was going to be a huge plus. That was going to be huge for us. Also, why is me and my big brain not getting into here faster? I feel like the bar is going up so slow. I don't need you, bro. Defense? I'm going to my own. Come on, bro. We're friends, bro. We're teammates. You can't be saying that. Also, you can't be saying that when you're losing like this. I'm going to do one ultimate and then you can do your thing. What's my thing? Oh, there we go. Lay him out. Holy lightning. Lay him out. Again. Win this. Win this. Part two. Two, two, three, three, three, four, three this time. What? Wait, what? What? Why did it get wrong? Why did it get wrong? Wait, what? Is it because you were both in full power so it just took away full power from both of you? What? Was that one? No. I didn't know that was how the game worked. This game is trash. Go. You should run. Stop them out. Stop them out. I can't even charge. Oh, Tom strike. I miss both times.  Oh, he's done. Three. I can't charge. We've all realized that. Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Let's see what he goes open for you. That's fine, I'm about to break the fourth wall again it's the only thing I can do, Spanish Go, win. I'm really struggling with that. That's not what winning means. Bro, I'm tagging you in to win. Sorry. There we go. But see I knew you'd win. Scatter Finger Beam part two the sequel. Alright, I'll always watch a part two of that. But what's your strategy for part three? No, the best trilogy since Back to the Future? Okay. What're you thinking for your next one though?


Hello people of the internet, my name is Johnny and welcome back to another video. More news, more games, more lore. I'm super excited. I'm also a day late, I apologize, had some stuff going on in the household that prevented me from recording. Trust me, this isn't the first time this has happened, it's happened many times before and several times when I wanted to stream so yeah, just kind of needed to get that off my chest so anyways, we have some new teasers, we have some more news about the upcoming projects. The triple A game has supposedly been cancelled for right now but again, we're going to get more into that. Again, we have the two teasers on scottgames.com, the one that was on fnaffle.com but has since been taken down and we also have a reason why from Scott and just something a little bit off to the side which is still very important but not really relevant to the news in this video. We have an official statement so I have no clue where that lag just cut me off but basically in summary, we have two new teasers to look at, we have two official statements to look at and we also have one, well the updated mega thread has been updated so we gotta take a look at that but for right now we're going to take a look at the help wanted statement that Scott posted about a day or two ago. So again, sorry I'm late on this but we're just gonna hop into it anyways. So here is the statement by Scott and it may not be the biggest on screen for you guys right now but it will of course be linked down below, same thing with all the teasers and of course the other statement and the mega thread, all those will be linked down below so if you want to take a look at them by yourself, certainly feel free to. So the post is called a lower question about help wanted and an answer. It's called cool help wanted law and this was posted one day ago. So let's read it. Hey everyone. So I received an email from a Reddit member yesterday asking me to clarify something specific about the law of help wanted. He was very polite and respectful with his question which I appreciate and I know it's sometimes that more than a few other users or my apologies and I know it's something that more than a few other users were confused about as well. So here I am to set the record straight and probably create more confusion in the process. The question is this, is Scott Cawthon now a part of the FNAF lore? The short answer is no. My name is never actually mentioned in the game. The game says that an indie developer was tarnishing the brand of Fazbear Entertainment by making video games about them, forcing them to rebrand and try to reclaim their good name by making a VR game that made more light of those crazy stories or was it all part of the plan? Yes, I use my own picture for this indie developer because it's an obvious parallel but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's actually me in universe. On the surface this might seem like an odd choice for a storyline in general but there was a very, very specific challenge while making help wanted. The challenge was this, how do you take characters that are canon along with characters that are questionably canon and characters from every point of the timeline and throw them all together in one game that is canon? That's quite the problem when you think about it but it was important for me that help wanted to mean something. I didn't want just a meaningless collection of minigames, although I'm sure most people would have been okay with that. I wanted it to be canon and that meant that I needed to solve the substantial puzzle of how. Now that you all know the problem, maybe you can understand my approach. That doesn't mean you have to agree that it was a good idea. I kept a bowl of candy outside, um, sorry, I kept a bowl of candy out for people who show up with torches and pitchforks out my front door. Again, if you've never seen the channel, I stuck it reading, I've said that many times in videos like this, my apologies. So no, I'm not canon. Freda isn't canon, the fan games aren't canon, you aren't canon. Only the existence of a game developer that supposedly made video games based on actual events that may or may not be covered up by Fazbear Entertainment is canon. Along these same lines, keep in mind that I do tend to use pictures of me and my family in the games just because they are so readily available.  I'll share the original sometime. He looked sweet as an angel in the original picture and I turned him into a monster. In FNAF 4, I used a picture of a mountain orange that I took while I was truck driving in West Texas. I used a picture of a snowman that me and my older sons made together. I used a picture of a pet marking bird that we nursed back to health one year. Did these have lower significance? Well, you probably already know the answer. Again, this doesn't mean you have to agree with any of it. I'm always available for a good roasting and I sometimes deserve it. Although I will say that I appreciate the fandom being polite about it, which everyone usually is. Smiley face. I hope this makes things clear as much for everyone. Expect a new teaser shortly. And those teasers we will get into right now, but let's dissect this message a little bit, shall we? So long story short, all the information you need to know is right here. Is Scott Cawthon canon to the lore? No. If you guys don't know, in Help Wanted there is, it was revealed that supposedly Scott, but we now know is not, there was a game developer who made the FNAF games to tarnish the brand. And again, this unfortunately does create a little bit more confusion for me in the process. I know it's probably still a bit confusing for other people as well. But basically all you need to know is that Scott Cawthon himself is not in the official lore. Freddit is not the fan games nor you the player or not, sorry, you the person playing the games are in the canon. I'm sorry, I probably didn't explain this well at all, but again, this will of course be linked down in the description, so make of it what you will. Something that's super sad is that I actually had a theory that I've been working on for a super long time. I say super long time, I haven't even written the script for it yet. Basically it went along that Scott was in the FNAF universe and that all his past games were connected. And this was going to be the thumbnail for it, but now I don't even have to use this anymore because Scott just debunked the theory right then and there. So yeah, here is a scrapped theory that really could have been out by now, would have been at least a few months ago if I had actually worked on it, but now I'm kind of glad I didn't because it is in fact wrong. Now we can move on to some of the juicy stuff. Not that that wasn't juicy, but now we have an updated list of the projects mega thread for the next two or three years. Fantastic news right off the bat. The FNAF movie number one has a finished script, which means they should be hiring cast soon, so stay and look out for more movie news in the future. FNAFAR.com, obviously check there for news about the FNAF AR game. FNAF Inter madness is on hold, or is it? Nothing to go along with that, which is super interesting. I guess we're just gonna have to see what happens in the future, I guess. I can't actually remember. I think Steel Wall was originally going to make it. Maybe they didn't want to or something. Then again, they are making another game in 2020, so I don't know man. FNAF Inter madness may or may not be a thing anymore. Console ports, we know all about them. In the triple A game, this is something that's super, super interesting. It says canceled, well, not really. There has been a shake up for this project. I'm actually not at liberate to discuss some details, but I'm taking control of this one and feel a lot better about its direction. This won't get started until late 2020, however. I don't remember the exact date for the triple A game when they were expecting it to be released, but now we know that it won't even get started until late of 2020. So I would say maybe a 2022 release date, maybe late 2021, even if this is going to be a thing. We do know that it was going to be multiplayer, I'm pretty sure, and the fact that Scott is taking it up by himself means this is no longer technically a triple A game, but apparently the Universal, the company that was originally making it, Scott didn't like the direction they were going with it, so he pulled the plug on that and now he's looking for a new company, which honestly, it seems bad, late 2020, that's super far away, and they got to make the thing, so 2021, 2022 for a release date, maybe. I'm super, super happy about that, because again, I've said this so many times about so many projects, it's better to be late and good than early and crap. So yeah, everyone, I know you're probably mad that it's been delayed, but trust me, this is for the best. The new book series done in a waiting publication, we've seen everything about this before. Some of these are pretty disturbing publication date December question mark, Amazon says December, I thought it was March, no one tells me anything. It's honestly super, super hilarious. Question mark, question mark, question mark, to be announced, the second game from Steel Wool estimated time of arrival 2020. Now, this is supposedly, again, I'm not entirely sure, although I think this is it. This new teaser currently on scottgames.com, let me quickly refresh. Yes, this is the teaser for what is supposedly the, excuse me, second game for Steel Wool. As you can see, it shows Freddie, the stand in there with his microphone stand. He's got an ear piecing in his, what I'm guessing to be his left ear. I'm guessing he's turned toward the audience because that would honestly make the most sense. And also because he's covering the stand, most likely means he's facing away from the camera. I don't see why he would have the stand behind his back. Anyways, we can still see the mall. We can see the, I believe it was the cinema up top or maybe it was down below. I don't know, but you can tell this is the same exact mall from the first teaser that we had about this game. And it also says walk underneath Freddie. There's not much to go off of this image. I guess it's just a better look at Freddie's model. We know that for once in his life, Freddie has been, he's been upgraded from a wireless microphone to a stand microphone. I actually don't know if that's an upgrade or a downgrade, but he now has a standing microphone, which is pretty cool to see. Honestly, it makes them look like a real rock star. Something I didn't point out is that if you open the image and notepad, you could actually find the official name for these new type of animatronics. And that is of course the glam rock animatronics. Very, very similar to the rock star animatronics. But definitely different. As we can see in the image as well, that this does have that 80s and mid, not mid, but early 90s feel. So this image is really, really hard to pick apart. Not only because it doesn't give us much information, but also because it's a lot different to what we're used to. You know, the characters are outside of their pizzeria. It looks like they're performing for an older demographic. These characters do not look like kids. They look more like teens to young adults to adults. So it definitely is an older demographic. So it's something we have not seen before in the entirety of the Five Nights at Freddie's franchise, really, that the characters are now aimed towards an older demographic rather than kids. So yeah, there's really not much to go off of this image. Just a better look at Freddie's model. I'm sure we're going to get more models shown off in the future. Also, the image that we just looked at, if you save it, it is seven underscore one, which it's kind of confusing because originally it was Five Nights at Freddy's nine. So I'm not sure why it got downgraded to seven. Not entirely sure. And now we move on to the old FNAF old teaser. Oh my gosh. So many people are talking about this and it has since been taken down off of FNAF world.com. You've all seen it. I don't need to make a big deal out of it. It's it's this. This was the image on FNAF world.com, teasing obviously Freddie in space or FNAF world update three. Again, we've all seen videos on this. There were four threes. You can find one near the tip of the rocket chip, one in Freddie's chest ab area off to the side. It's kind of like his obliques. Well, that's a muscle I learned in wellness class. There's also one on his on his his left arm. And then there's also one right under the female wolf's leg. We we're not going to talk about the female wolf or Freddie's design. We're just going to talk about which you can talk about what this game could be. So obviously it has a release date for next year, as you can tell from the text up top. It's pretty obvious next year being 2020. And those four threes make it seem like it's FNAF world update three. And as we find out later, it does have to do with FNAF world. But whether this is just Freddie in space, or if it really is an entirely new update three for FNAF world. It's not entirely clear whether it is, you know, Freddie in space 58 or Freddie in space. Number two, whatever you want to call it. Or if it is an entirely new update three, this is the only thing we have to go off of. And of course, the the post that Scott has made about this image, why it's been taken down, which we will go into now. Again, I don't really want to talk about the appearances, because I think that's been talked about enough in the community. And Scott has already addressed it in this post. So yeah, let's take a look at the post. So the post says about that FNAF world teaser. So you know, it's a pretty serious post. Hey, everyone, I went ahead and removed that FNAF world teaser. And I want to apologize to everyone. My goal really was to just to create a fun and crazy teaser for like an April Fool's game or something. But I think maybe it came out a little too over the top. Maybe I'll re-upload after a few more edits. Good night to all. Hashtag FNAF world curse continues. Now, again, we've already talked about the appearances of the characters, you know, Freddie and also Wendy, as Lewis calls it. And as Scott said, maybe it came out a little too over the top. And I can completely see where he's coming from.  We've all seen it before. Everyone knows that Jesus Christ. To be fair, I really like the teaser, not in that way. Don't get the wrong opinion. I didn't think it was that bad. I did see it as a fun and crazy teaser. Obviously, it wasn't supposed to be taken seriously. I think that was pretty obvious, though maybe not to some people. And also the hashtag FNAF world curse continues. Again, that does mean it has something to do with FNAF world update three or FNAF world in general, whether it is just update three or Freddie in space number two, whatever you want to call it FNAF 58, even though that's technically poop, it's in space. So it does have something to do with FNAF world. It's very, very clear. It says it out, not the whole thing. Write down, write down here. God dang it. Thank you. But yeah, obviously, it's just supposed to be a fun teaser. Don't take it personally. Don't take it seriously. Scott is not trying to mean anything. It's just supposed to be fun and crazy. Okay. So that's it. It feels like this video ended on a pretty bad note about people complaining about the teaser. But again, I fully understand where they're coming from and I can safely say that Scott did not mean for the image to come out this way, but it definitely is interesting nonetheless, Scott. But again, that is it. Thank you everyone so much for watching. Get hyped for all the new games coming out next year and for the next few years. Thanks everyone so much for watching. Sorry this video was a bit longer than it should have been, but again, I did miss this last night and I apologize for that. You know, household obstacles, I guess you could say. So again, thanks everyone for watching. Really love the support you guys are giving me. I feel absolutely honored. We're coming up on 100,000 total views for the channel. I do have something planned for that. It might not be ready exactly once we hit 100,000 views, but trust me, it's going to be worth it. So thanks everyone so much for watching and I will see you all on the flip side. Goodbye.


Learning environment Learning environment can refer to an educational approach, cultural context, or physical setting in which teaching and learning occur. The term is commonly used as a more definitive alternative to classroom but it typically refers to the context of educational philosophy or knowledge experienced by the student and may also encompass the variety of learning cultures it's presiding ethos and characteristics, how individuals interact, governing structures, and philosophy. In a societal sense, learning environment may refer to the culture of the population it serves and of their location. Learning environments are highly diverse in use, learning styles, organization, and educational institution. The culture and context of a place or organization includes such factors as a way of thinking, behaving, or working, also known as organizational culture. For a learning environment such as an educational institution, it also includes such factors as operational characteristics of the instructors, instructional group, or institution. The L philosophy or knowledge experienced by the student and may also encompass the variety of learning cultures it's presiding ethos and characteristics, how individuals interact, governing structures, and philosophy. In a so earning styles and pedagogies used, and the societal culture of where the learning does occur in.