hello everybody, and welcome to howreal nonprofits fundraise with microsoft. just a little bit about the tool youwe are using today, we are in readytalk and you should be hearing your audioplayed through your computer's speakers. if you do want a call in number you cango ahead and ask for one in the chat pane and we can go ahead and send that to you, butyou should be able to listen via your computer and speakers. if for some reason you dolose your internet connection any time today, once you get back reconnected you can rejoin theconference the same way you just joined it now. and if for some reason you justcompletely cannot get back into the session you can go ahead and watch the recordingwhich we will be sending out later today
along with the presentationmaterials and additional links. so again, this will be how realnonprofits fundraise with microsoft. a little bit about who is on today, myname is kyla hunt and i am your facilitator and the webinar programmanager here at techsoup global. and with me today is sherry sewellfrom northwest hope & healing, and paula lucas from americans overseasdomestic violence crisis center. and also with me today is megcreelman who is also from techsoup, so you might see either my nameor meg's name in the chat box responding to any of your questions.
again, if you do have questions you cango ahead and type those into the chat pane and we will either get back to you via chat or iwill read any applicable questions to the presenters following their sections. if for some reasonwe don't get to any of your questions today, i will try to find either a resource to forwardyou or i will have the speakers answer your question and i will get that question answeredto you after the presentation. we should be able to have mostof the questions answered today. so a little bit about the agenda. firstwe are going to hear from sherry sewell about the northwest hope &healing, her organization. she'll talk a little bit about the organizationjust to give us some kind of grounding
in what they do and what fundraisingsolutions they were looking for, and how some of microsoft's products actuallyhelped in these fundraising solutions. we will then hear from paula lucas aboutthe americans overseas domestic violence crisis center. again, she will give a littlebit of background about her organization and talk about how microsoft productshave helped in their fundraising efforts. at the very end of the webinar we aregoing to be hearing from meg creelman a little bit about the microsoft softwaredonation program. and she is just going to give you a little bit more information incase you are interested in requesting any products through this program.
so with that i am going to go ahead and giveit over to sherry to go ahead and get started. sherry: thank you kyla. and i want tosay thank you to all the folks at techsoup for inviting us to bea part of this webinar. to give you a little backgroundabout northwest hope & healing, the organization was started by christinesmith who is a breast cancer survivor. and she was diagnosed and went throughtreatment for breast cancer in 2000. and when she was going through treatmentshe recognized that there were a lot of women around her going through the same thing thatdidn't have support and they had unmet needs. she wanted to pay forward what she had andhelp that she had received from her family
and friends. so she gathered allher family and friends together and explained what she wanted to do.and her family and friends helped her get the organization off the ground by contributingseed money to help provide for the basic needs of women when they weregoing through treatment. so today our healing programs include a patientassistance fund which is money that is set aside to pay for things that insurance doesn'tcover like food, and rent, and gas for the car, and child care. and we also have ahealing basket program which are baskets that are distributed at the hospital whenwomen are newly diagnosed with breast cancer. so back in 2004, the organizationhad kind of grown legs of its own
and it was clear that the charitywas going to the next level. that was the time when christine decidedto bring on one part-time employee and that was myself. we are just regularpeople. we didn't have any nonprofit experience, but we felt that this is important to helpother women. so we thought you know what? let's figure this out. so we incorporatedand we gained our nonprofit status. we were basically starting from scratchand we needed to create a professional look without a lot of money. so throughresearch we discovered techsoup stock. and we utilized a microsoft office donationto reach our goal of creating a professional, legitimate looking nonprofit organizationthat we could present to our donors.
so a few of the microsoft office products thatwe do use are publisher, and word, and powerpoint as well as outlook fore-mail and excel spreadsheet. so i'll start with talking a little bitabout how we've used microsoft publisher. when we started i had very little experiencewith creating marketing pieces and such. we were able to use publisher and the templatesin publisher to create postcards, and flyers, and booklets, and even newsletters. sowhat you should be seeing now is a brochure, a registration form forour annual 5k walk and run. one of the great things aboutpublisher is they have templates. and you don't have to be a graphic designer.you can go in. you can look at the templates.
and you can pick out one that you like the looksof, and then just kind of fill-in the boxes. and you can alsochange the color scheme. so originally with our 5k, our color schemewas green and pink because those are our colors, green and pink. and then a few yearslater we changed it to blue and pink. so it was really easy to go back intopublisher and just go right up to the formatting and change the color scheme to blue and pink.so that is what i love so much about publisher. and also we were able to create anewsletter using the templates in publisher. and again, we kind of keep thesame look, similar templates for the different pieces that we do produce.so whether it is a brochure, a postcard,
or newsletter, it all kind of has asimilar look. and we didn't have any money to hire a graphic designer, so this was a reallygreat solution for us to use these templates. and here you can see ourgreen and pink color scheme. the next thing i want to show you is a programthat we put together for our annual fashion show. and again, using the templates in publisher, weare able to create a really great looking piece that everyone, all the guests that come toour fashion show can take home with them. and i'm just going to share withyou on my desktop this program and kind of show you some of thefeatures that i love most about publisher. we can easily change the formatting if we want.you go to page set up and you can do a booklet.
you could do a full page, custom, that kindof thing, so you can change the format of it really easily. you can change thecolor scheme by just you know — they have all these predesigned color schemes.i found that sometimes i think i'm smarter than a graphic designer and ithink oh, i want these other colors. i want to create my own custom color scheme.and usually, it ends up looking really bad. and i end up going back to one ofthe already designed color schemes because they look so good. and all the colorsare complementary and they work together. so what's great about publisher is thatyou can easily add pages to your program. and what i usually do is i insert a page andi copy everything that was on the previous page
when i am inserting new pages, so that it all linesup on the page like it was on the previous page. so i don't have to do a lot of moving around.so that's what i really love about publisher. let's go back to ourslide show here if we can. so some of the tips that i have touse publisher is to take advantage of those pre-designed templates. they lookgood, they really do. and all you have to do is fill in the fields, or thesquares, or the boxes, or whatever, and really use thosepre-selected color schemes because it's super easy andthey always, always look good. we also use microsoft word to create reallygreat looking documents and letterhead.
and that was important when we were launchingthe organization and getting off the ground. we felt it was important tohave a professional image. we didn't want people to think we were abrand-new nonprofit and things looked sloppy. so one of the things that you shouldbe seeing now is a registration form for our annual walk & run. and we wereable to create a letterhead template with a black and white logo as well as a colorlogo. and one of the great things about word is you can easily go in — sincewe have a registration form which has time sensitive information,— i'm not sure how clearly you can see but there is an early bird registration.so once that date had passed,
you can just go into your documents and youcan do a strike through to cross that out without deleting it and changing the formattingof the whole page and that kind of thing. so it is really simple to use. and then i would like to show you an exampleof our letterhead which we created in word. and i love that it has the abilityto do the header and the footer. so in the header we put in our color logoand in the footer put in a description of what the organization is, as well as ourcontact information, our mailing address, our phone number, our website. and in this letter you will see weinserted my signature. and i love this
because we all use e-mail so much these days thatby inserting my signature in a letter like this, i can e-mail this receipt to someone.i don't have to spend money on a stamp. and how i did that was i signed my name witha nice dark black pen and scanned my signature and saved it as a jpeg file, as a photofile. and then when i was in my documents i went to the signature line and i just putinsert photo. i selected it from the folder on my computer. and then i just sized itaccordingly so it actually kind of looks like it was my signature. it wasn't agiant signature and it wasn't too small. so it actually looks really good. so some tips i have with word, tips wouldbe keep it simple. use the templates.
they have templates there. use the headers andfooters. and save — create and save templates. like our letterhead, i have it saved as a templateso any time i want to write a letter, send a receipt, i just go in and open up thattemplate, customize it for my needs, and then send it off whichis really great. we love word. we also use microsoft powerpoint to create presentations. and here is a sample of the first page ofthe presentation that we originally created probably six, seven, eight years ago.and again, we were a young organization and we wanted to look legitimateto our donors. it is super easy to select these predesigned backgrounds. it'sgot a little bit of visual interest in it.
it is not just a plain white background or aplain color. it is super easy to change the colors. so say you have an event like our fashion showwhere your colors might be pink and blue or gray, it's really easy to changecolors. you can add animations. you can add sound to makeit a little more interesting. i try to when i'm doing a power pointpresentation, i try to use lots of photos and keep the wordsmore like bullet points because people aren't really going to be readingit. they are going to be looking at pictures and kind of getting an overallimpression of the organization. so some of the tips with power point would beagain, keep it simple. use your main points.
keep it simple. use lots of pictures, graphics.take advantage of animations, slide transitions, and even add some soundto keep it interesting. other microsoft software that we use that camewith our program, we create and send e-mails with microsoft outlook. we use the calendarfor events that happen year to year, when we need to know hey, next april ihave to call so and so the photographer for our fashion show next april.well, a really great thing to do is to put it in the outlook calendar and seta reminder, and that will automatically pop up. in addition to outlook we also use microsoftexcel spreadsheets to keep track of our donors. and it is really great to be able to mergethe information from excel to microsoft word
and create labels. so when we want to send outcards or invitations or something like that, we can easily getlabels, mailing labels. we are also able in excel to create charts forannual reports. so we can kind of wow people. there are some people that like to see chartsand some people that like to see the data, the numbers. and i find it really helpful to haveboth of those things listed in our annual reports. so you can create a pie chart, alldifferent kind of charts that you can create. it's really easy. and we just love it. so bottom line, by utilizing the softwaredonation program through techsoup stock we are able to host fundraising events. we areable to communicate effectively with our donors.
and we are able to maintain a professionalappearance to the public and our donors without spending a ton of money. ourdonors, they really appreciate that. they love the fact that when they makea donation they know we are not spending a ton of money on — we're not wasting it. so it'sreally — the microsoft software has really helped our fundraising efforts and helpedus create a really professional image to gain donor's trust and support.so we just love it. thank you. kyla: great, thank you sherry. i reallyappreciate that. so before we go to paula's section i did want to cover a couple of questions. and ifanybody has any additional questions for sherry, just go ahead and typethose into the chat pane.
so sherry, it sounds like you were theone that was doing a lot of the creation of the documents in publisher and things likethat. how steep of a learning curve did you find using something like publisher was? sherry: the learning curve comespretty fast if you use the templates. it is a lot easier when you do use templates.let me just say that. you select a template. you pick your color scheme. and you fill in the fieldsbasically. so it is just kind of trial and error. and you know, the learning curve ispretty steep. it comes pretty fast. and yes, i was the one doing it and idon't have a graphic design background. but we just thought, let's keepit simple. let's keep it clean.
and let's utilize the greatsoftware that we got donated. kyla: definitely. and it definitely soundslike the usage of these has really helped in developing a professional imageand in your fundraising efforts. do you have an estimate for abouthow many people you reach annually? sherry: our database, our donordatabase is just over 4000. kyla: okay, that's really great forsomething that seems regionally centered. are most of the people in thatdatabase, are they local to your area? sherry: right. most of our donors arelocal in the pacific northwest area. and when christine started the organizationshe had may be 100, 200 family and friends
that were part of that. and you know, afterthree or four years that quickly grew to 400, 500, and then jumped to 1000. so we really, with excelhave been able to keep track of all those people and keep track of their donations. but now after12 years we are up to just over 4000 supporters. kyla: and one question is, were there anyspecific resources that you really utilized in kind of teaching yourself how to use excela little bit more or something like that? sherry: you know, i think, a lot ofwhat we learned was just trial and error. and there's always been that little helpbox up in the corner of the programs. so if you have a question you can type in,how do i do whatever, insert a page or whatever it might be. if it is not in the glossary of theactual program, it does open up another window
and direct you to the online resources. so that'spretty cool. and that usually answers any — if i'm trying to figure somethingout, i can usually find the answer. kyla: definitely. and we are going tobe sending some of those online resources in the follow-up message soeverybody will have access to that. and we do have a question from tracy who isasking, do you have a donor database template you used or did you custommake your own database? sherry: like i said, we started from scratch andfrom the ground up. we just kind of figured it out as we went along. so yeah, we custommade our own to what we needed. so you start with the donor's name, address,mailing address, and maybe phone number
and e-mail. and then you just usethe columns. so like our fashion show, you would have a column for fashion show.and then you would have a column for 5k. and then if we have a wine tasting event,have a column for the wine tasting event. you just kind of keep adding columns.the hardest part is just getting started, but really it's easy. it really is easy. kyla: great. so i do want to go ahead and getto paula's section. but thank you so much sherry for that great information. and if thereare any more questions that we have time to send your way at the end ofthe presentation we will do that. sherry: thank you.
kyla: alright, thanks. and paula, youcan go ahead and get to your first slide and go ahead and get started. paula: well good morning. thankyou all for joining us today. i'm really excited to be able to talk aboutthe organization and how we use microsoft and techsoup in our organization. so our mission is we help americansabused in foreign countries. and i founded this organization myselfin 1999 after escaping the middle east with my three children and realizedthat there were no resources for an american woman abused overseas.
and it is a very big populationof americans that live overseas. you have 6.23 million, plus1 million military dependents. so i started this organization inthe hopes of being able to reach this globally dispersedpopulation and offer them services. and i basically was kind of like what sherrywas talking about with her organization, grassroots effort, no experience in nonprofitmanagement, no experience in any of this, but just had this passion that i really wantedto help other american women and children who had been suffering in foreign countries,and had no money to do this at all, zero money, zero resources, nothing at all. i justkind of dove in you know, baptism by fire.
so i am just giving you kind of anidea of we are based in portland oregon yet we serve this global population. so bothout reach and education was a challenge for us. and also fundraising, because we are not likein one local area where we would go and say okay, we are running a shelter in portland.would the people in portland support this? we are trying to reach this globallydispersed population for services and for fundraising as well. and there i put up some statisticson the 10 years. we run a hotline. we provide all these services, sort ofwhere we've been. so we've helped almost 3000 families in 101 countries, but we've also hadto raise money for this population to serve it.
so the first thing i want to talk about,one of the things when we built our website is we wanted to be able tohave donations on the website. we also wanted to be able to changecontent whenever we wanted to, so we wouldn't have to bother our web masterevery time we wanted to make a little change on the website. we are not technology people.we are advocates and we are nonprofit people. we are not tech people. so i'm going to share my desk top here.and i am going to show what we did. if you look at that what's new partand that kind of scroll through, we had purchased the visual studio whichis a microsoft product through techsoup.
and then there is a programminglanguage called visual basic. so what we did is we wentto our web master and said, we want to be able to have change dynamiccontent. we want to have this what's new section and be able to update thatourselves. so he created this for us. so we just go to our website andtype in admin, and it comes up with the user name and a password.i need to put this in here, okay. so now this gives us this sort of likedesktop where we can go in ourselves. now we put the picture ourselves.people can put any picture they want. but here we can put news articles.we can put homepage teasers.
we can announce our training. so i'mactually going to update this live right now to show you how easy it is to update,and we are not technical people. so i am going to add a new teaser. and this teaser is that we are going tobe launching in july our miles for moms. so what we do is we are asking peopleto donate miles that they may have that they are not using so that we canget american mothers and their children back to the united states to safety, ormaybe they arrive in one spot in the us and we need to getthem to another place. so what i'm going to do is go here and startat the start date. and i can go very easily.
i'm going to go to july 1st is my startdate. my ends date is going to be august 30th. it's going to be a two-month promotionthat we are trying to raise miles. now you have an option of no link. wecan link to another webpage if we want and we can put the url. we can link toan e-mail, and we can link to another file and we can upload that file. right nowi am just going to put link type "none" because we haven't prepared the pagefor that yet. but what we would do is once we prepare the page for the milesfor moms, then we would just click url and put the url that this would go to. soright now i am just going to pick "none." but here then i can just type in"miles for moms," and just like,
"do you have miles you are not using? pleasedonate them to mothers and children in need," for example. and actually i want to change this start dateto today, because i want to show how quickly it goes live on the website. so i'm goingto actually put today's date on there and i will just take it offafterwards. so that's all we have to do. then do we want to show more? so herewhat we would do is we could say "yes" and then when people click on this it would goto more text someplace else, or we just say "no." and then i just say add new teaser.so now when i come to my desktop i can see that here is the miles for moms.it gives me the start date and the end date.
and if i want to edit it or delete it, it'sjust really easy to edit that or delete that. so now what i'm going to do is a log outand just go back to my original website here. and "what's new," look, it's already there. i didn'tbold it, but that miles for moms is already there. so it's instant. it's dynamic. wecan make changes to the website. so this is really great, thisdonation from techsoup and microsoft because we are not programmers like i said. ifwe have something really quick we want to put on the website, we just go in there and put it oninstead of sending the request to our web master who maybe is a volunteer for us. we don'tpay him. it might be a week or 10 days before he is able to get to this. and this waywe can just instantly do our dynamic content
immediately in the office. so i'm going to go back to the nextslide. so the next challenge we had is that we wanted to launch our globalcampaign to empower americans abused abroad. and so we were trying to reach a globallydisbursed community both for outreach and education, but also for fundraisingbecause we need to get money from the people that we serve and they areglobally disbursed in 190 countries. so we used publisher that enabledus to produce our materials. i am not going to go too much into publisherbecause sherry did quite a bit of that. but you can see the posters that weused. we also did brochures and stickers
and things like that on publisher. and wewere able to do our materials and to again, make them very, very professionallooking to an international audience. these posters and things were going intoamerican embassies all over the world, american schools all over the world. so it wasreally our world wide image we were presenting and needed to have it look professional. wedidn't have thousands and thousands of dollars to hire a designer or marketingcompany, so we did this all ourselves. it was just sort of using publisher andsaying okay, what are we going to do? we did the photography ourselves. and these are othercountries that we went to.
we actually went to and physically presented.but this image we did our own photography. we did everything ourselves and weare able to do that through publisher. now another challenge we really had goingthrough all these places around the world in different countries in different cities ishow are we going to keep track of all these places we are going. so what we did —i'm going to share my desktop again, and close that one. —is that we used excel. so what we did — this is an example of theone we did where we went to london, amsterdam, frankfurt, copenhagen, paris, and geneva,and it was part of our global campaign. so we had all of our informationin one excel spreadsheet,
everything that we needed to knowabout these trips that we were taking. so the first tab was logistics — and idid eliminate quite a bit of information just because we had people's personalnames, and e-mails, and things in there. so in amsterdam, where are welocating? is the equipment ready? what is happening with the food? whereare we staying? so things like that, we could look at one screen and know wherewe were staying and where we needed to be. then we needed who was attendingthese information sessions because this was also information andeducation but it was also an out reach where people were paying to come tothese presentations that we were giving.
so here are the participant'snames. are they an ambassador, because we were also training people tobecome our global out reach ambassadors. are they having lunch? what is theire-mail? did they pay? what is their address? are they signed up for thenewsletter? so all this information about the people that were comingto the information sessions. and then if somebody wantedto be an ambassador for us, they needed to do an application. so thisis one central area where we could find out about who applied to be an ambassador.are their references okay over here? do they have experience in public speaking?do they have experience with domestic violence?
was their application accepted or denied to bepart of this program? all in the same workbook. us embassy contacts, i eliminatedthat just for confidentiality purposes. and then in each city that we went towe also spoke to the american embassies. and then this was logistics for eachparticular site that we were presenting at. so in london, where were we presenting?did we present it at the american church? this is the address. did we have topay? what is the capacity of the room that we are going to be presentingin? who is in charge of the equipment? how are we going to get the food? whereare we staying? how do we get there? what is the airline information? it isall here for each city, again, one sheet.
and this was actually, we had it as a shareddocument, so i did this particular trip so as i was traveling, my person in theoffice that was helping me with the logistics could update this at any point in time.and because it was a shared document i could just reach this and findout if there were any updates. so again, the rest of it is just for each city thatwe went to. so this was an excellent tool for us to have this excel sheet haveall the information in one place. that was really good. and thatis just more of the cities. so the other thing we use in the organization alot — and we do use word. we do use publisher. we do use powerpoint. our powerpointpresentations, our global campaign
was a powerpoint presentation. we dowebinars to train military advocates. it is all done by powerpoint throughthe webinars. so we use that extensively. we use word for all of our correspondence.and then we use microsoft outlook. we have a very diverse staff and very differentlevel of technical accomplishment i guess. so all of the microsoft products arereally easy to use. for e-mail, for outlook, one of the great features is that we have manymeetings in multiple time zones all the time. so it is setting up meetings and thosemeetings automatically will go to the time zone that the people are in so we allknow when we are supposed to meet, because that can get really, reallycomplicated. we've had that multiple times before
where we set a meeting at 10:00 am pacific timebut people on the east coast think it is 10:00 am their time. so with the outlook calendar weare able to share that with all the participants in the meetings and it will show theirtime zones. so that is really helpful too. so we have really enjoyed havingthese techsoup and microsoft products. especially like visual studio, we wouldn'thave been able to afford to have that package if we hadn't have been able to get it throughtechsoup, or a lot of these other ones. so also for start up nonprofit, grass-roots,that's still founder driven, still growing, having this techsoup and microsoftpartnership has been wonderful for us. so that's it. doesanybody have any questions?
kyla: we have had a few questions come inmainly around visual basic or visual studio. and al was wondering, to understand i wouldneed to have a website designed in visual basic and that would give a nontechnical person likeme to make changes to the website on the fly. is that correct? paula: that's correct. and i don't think theentire website has to be done in visual basic. i don't think our entire website is done inthat. i think it is just that portion of it. i should have asked my tech guy thisquestion. but i know that we had the website up for quite a long time before we hadthat feature, so i don't think he went in and completely reprogrammed the entire website.i think he was just able to use that to program it
for the dynamic content. kyla: got it. and we did have a coupleother questions about visual studio that were a little bit more technical.i'm going to go ahead and read them and if you know the answer, great. and if youdon't, i'll just go ahead and do some research and we will definitely get the questionsanswered. tommy was wondering if it is possible to attach film clips tovisual basic or visual studio? paula: yes. so as i went in itand i was making those changes, then what you could do is you could link it,a link to another page and you can have that whatever it is on that page and they could just linkto that film clip and then the film clip could play.
kyla: okay, great. that's fantastic.and lorraina was wondering, do you know if visual studio could beused for bilingual website maintenance? paula: i don't know. kyla: and i will definitely do some researchon that. i will do some research on that and i will get an answer to you lorraina hopefullythis week. and barbara was wondering, did you create the poster, i guessthis poster, with a microsoft product? paula: yes, with publisher. kyla: okay, great. and i know that youmentioned that you have a volunteer it person that helps you out. do you have any suggestionsfor nonprofits or other organizations
in finding a volunteer it person? paula: it's very difficult actually. and iam just going to be completely transparent and say it's my husband. so i guess youcould marry one. that's one way to do it. through the universities if theyhave a programming department that it can be a project for them. i know thathere in portland we've gotten different interns for different things through those kindsof programs through the universities. but it is hard to find a volunteer it person.it's a challenge for a small nonprofit, because they are really expensiveif you have to pay somebody. kyla: definitely, definitely. so when usingexcel or using publisher, or even using a tool
kind of created for you through visualbasic — i asked this to sherry — but what was your perception of thelearning curve with using any of these tools? paula: well, i think it was really easyand i think word is very simple, powerpoint. i think they are all really simple. publisher ithink is a little bit, i think it is still easy but it takes a little bit longer just to learnthe tools and learn how to insert pictures and how to change text boxes and things.still i think it is really pretty easy. and like sherry said, there's the templatesand they already have everything there for you so those can be used. so yeah, i thinkthe microsoft products are fabulous. i think we wouldn't be able to do a lot of thethings that we have done if we didn't have them.
kyla: great, thank you. so with that i am goingto go ahead and give it over to meg from techsoup to kind of talk about the donation program alittle bit more. but i wanted to thank you paula for this really great section on how youare using microsoft products for fundraising. it's really, really appreciated. and then ifthere are any more questions after meg's section i will go ahead and read those to youboth as well. so again, thank you paula. paula: you are welcome. thank you. meg: okay, i believei have the floor now. hello everyone. now what we aregoing to talk about is specifically is how you as nonprofits may requestmicrosoft donations through techsoup.
one thing we are going to take a lookat is the actual microsoft donation page. this is a screen shot of what the start ofthe page looks like. it is a little confusing if you don't know what it isspecifically that you are looking for, but we are going to go aheadand talk a little bit about that. i am going to to start off with one thinghowever, there has been some confusion. as someone who takes many, many,many e-mails and phone calls about the microsoft program, let me say rightoff the bat, it is not limited to one request per calendar year. you may request microsoftas many times over the course of the year as you need as long as you don't exceed themaximum but we will get to that in a moment.
so i am going to go ahead and show everyone,this is the actual start of the techsoup website. you can see, get microsoft request any time.so if you notice over on the right-hand side of the techsoup webpage, there isan area that called find solutions. if you don't know quite what it is you arelooking for, and this is not just for microsoft. this is for any donor. you can infact, select products by category. so if you want to organize andmanage data, you would select that. but we are going to focus specifically onhow to request certain things from microsoft. so we are going to go browse by partner,scroll down, select microsoft and click on view. and this will bring up as soon as the web serverallows it, — of course i'm on the spot now
so it's making me look foolish. come on. ka-chunk, ka-chunk,ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-chunk, and there it goes. okay, so here is the microsoft start page.it gives you useful bits like the eligibility and restrictions guides. most nonprofitsare in fact eligible to request microsoft. so if you find that you select what it is youare looking for and you discover for some reason you are not, you might want come backto this page and do the eligibility check which will ask you what kind oforganization you are. what is your budget? although i will let you know withmicrosoft that is not an issue.
microsoft donates tobudgets of all types. to actually request the items you are lookingfor, you will notice there are some things which are a little confusing. for example,there is microsoft windows pc operating system upgrades and then there is this other onethat's called full pc operating systems. those are for the actualwindows 7 operating system. and then you get into thingslike desktop application software. this is where you will find office. office is one of the more popular and certainlyone of the more useful software donations that we have. this also has whereyou find the individual applications
like if you just needed the latest versionof excel which we saw demoed earlier, you can find it under individual applications,also things like multi-language packs which would be very useful for organizationsthat do have to deal with organizations that have branches in differentcountries and speak different languages. but we are going to poke into officesuites so you can see what it looks like. now this is what happens when youbreak it down to the actual products. you'll notice that it has the briefdescription, a product id which is very useful and i will show you how useful in a moment, anda link to see more about particular products. it will show what the donor is which ismicrosoft. it will show you what the platform is.
you'll notice some of them are forwindows some of them are for mac. so office and microsoft products areavailable for non-windows pc systems. it shows you whether it is available ortemporarily out of stock or out of stock completely, discontinued, what have you.and it has the admin fee. now, there is one confusion about the adminfee a lot. the admin fee is to help techsoup maintain the program. it is a requirementfrom microsoft and all of our donors that we have some minimal admin fee becausethey are not going to directly support us. we technically have to support ourselves.so this admin fee is per license. a license is what allows the softwareto actually install on a system.
we'll get more into that in a minute.but just so you know, admin fee, that is the admin fee per license. now we will go ahead and take a look atfor example, office professional plus 2010. okay, so this is what a product page usuallylooks like again, the admin fee, the donor partner, the platform, and the product id. i'm goingto copy that if it will let me. there we go. captioner: excuse me. this is the captioner. iam getting a message that they are not able to see the screen views or the presentation. meg: really? that's terribly unhelpful. captioner: i can see it but for some reasonwanita briant is saying she can't see it.
kyla: this is kyla again. if you wantto recommend that they either get out and then try to get back in, because i am seeingit is well, and i am getting a lot of other messages saying that other people can see it.so that would be my recommendation to just kind of try to shut it down andget back in. and if not, we are recording it so we will be sending it toall registrants later today. captioner: okay, sorry to interrupt. kyla: oh, no worries. thank you. meg: okay, sorry for that interruptionthere. so product id, title group that is something that i would recommendthat if you have questions about title groups,
actually call into customer service because it isa a lot easier to explain with a little more time than we have right now. and format,notice that it says dvd-rom by request. that means that in the checkout process youhave the option to request a copy of the software on disc, and again, the availability. so i really recommend that when youare looking for particular products that you go ahead and take alook at the full product page. you'll notice it has all sorts of usefulinformation about what is included. excel is included, outlook, powerpoint,publisher, all these very useful things. and also as you scroll down showswhat kind of versions are available
and it will also show you related products,and it will show you the system requirements. so if you are not 100% certain that yoursystem can handle this particular software, this is information to know. say for example you browse aroundand you want to find it again, what i'm doing is i'm pasting that productid into our search screen, clicking search, and this is the search result. so i highlyrecommend that if you need to present to any board that we are interested inthis software, grab the product id's. it will help you find thesoftware again later on. so we are going to go back to our slides. now itouched a little bit on how you will actually choose
— i went too far. my apologies — howyou will actually choose your delivery. dvd-rom by request was on thatparticular one that i showed you. some of them however, it is dvd-romonly. now that is actually rather rare. in some cases what you get is download only.in either event whether it is by request or dvd only or even when itis actually just download, once you go through the restrictionscheck and the checkout process which is a fairly standard process foranybody who is familiar with requesting anything online these days. you selectthe items, you add them to your cart. you update the total amount. so if you wantfive copies, you update the total amount
i want five copies. i want my media. okay,wonderful. it will go through the restrictions check which again is just going to checkto see if you as an organization are eligible to request theproducts. microsoft is very, very open so there should not be any issues. again, ifyou run into an issue by all means, do call us. once you go through the process,you submit your payment information whether it is that you are going topay by check you are allowed to do, or pay by credit card immediately,you will receive two e-mails. the first one you are going to receive isa confirmation of your donation request. that is to confirm that we did receiveyour request and we are going to process it.
this is going to be an e-mail from techsoup.the next e-mail that you are going to receive is going to have a title, microsoftvolume licensing and fulfillment and activation for your donation.and again i've gone too far. and that is where you are going to see thisinformation, because you are going to receive an e-mail with an awful lot of instructions.specifically, you are going to receive information about retrieving keys and managing licenses.the licenses in question are actually sent out and released by microsoft themselves,but what we send you, techsoup sends you, is the information on how to access that.and the advantage is that all of this comes with technical support frommicrosoft if there is a problem.
but in addition, say forexample your system crashes. you need to reload your entireoffice suite on a new system because the old system is just simplygone. the licenses allow you to reinstall on a second system without needingto actually purchase it again which is for organizations that are trying tokeep their costs down like nonprofits is essential. you'll notice that there are a few strangeitems in here. for example, for products with kms and mak keys. don't worry about that.that is something that is going to show up on the actual microsoft volume licensingsite when you have access to it. but we will happily at techsoup, we attechsoup customer service will happily help you
through that. the upshot is that thisis information you do want to know because this is the critical e-mailthat you will receive with instructions on how to access your license andretrieve it and download if necessary, but the end result is you willhave full support from microsoft. there is a group that is calledthe volume licensing service center and that will allow you to havefull access and full support. now i noticed that there were coupleof questions that have popped up. how many software donationsare you allowed per year? i'm going to assume that you meanspecifically how many microsoft donations
are you allowed per year. i'm going to go back actually to my desktopand hopefully everybody will be able to see it. i'm going to go back to theoffice professional plus page. this is where things get a little broken downbecause the way that microsoft donation works is you are allowed up to 10 title groups.a title group is a group of like products. all the office products for example are all in onetitle group. you are allowed up to 50, 5-0 licenses per title group. so in total, youare allowed basically 500 licenses. why is that not working? i'm sorry ladiesand gentlemen. oh, there we go. that's better. so if you notice here on the productpage it says, title group office suite.
and if you are not able to view thewebsite on any of the product pages that information will be there for the microsoftitems. it will be right under the product id, what the title group is. so there are approximately 15 to 18 titlegroups. i unfortunately don't know them all off the top of my head, but they are broken downto like items like office is one title group. again, on any product page that information as towhich title group that will be [indistinct]. so, the course of a two-year periodyou are allowed up to 10 title groups, 50 licenses per title group. one exceptionis server licenses which is a mess i'm not sure people want to go into right nowespecially since we are running out of time.
but that's the basic, 10 titlegroups, 50 licenses per title group. again, any other questions, please feelfree to submit them even after the webinar. and you can always call customer service andask because we are happy to help you on that. so at this point i think we are just about doneso i am going to go ahead and give it back to kyla. and if there are any otherquestions i will see what i can do. kyla: okay, thanks meg. i really appreciatethat. and yeah, any of the questions that we didn't get to, i'll make surethat we respond at least within the week. but i do want to thank meg, i want tothank sherry and, i want to thank paula for all of their really great presentations.we really, really appreciate them.
a little bit about who techsoup is, weare a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization just like so many of you out there. wedo try to provide you with the technology and technology resources that you needto complete your organization's mission. and this is that same techsoup websitethat meg was showing a little bit ago. but don't forget to check out our learningcenter, our blog, and subscribe to our newsletters over there on the right, by thecup and new product donation alert. so again i want to thank all the presenters today.i want to thank microsoft for the great collaboration on this webinar series. and i wantto thank our webinar sponsor readytalk for providing the donation that allowsus to do the webinars in readytalk.
so again, thank you all foryour participation today. you will be receiving a follow-up message withinprobably the day with the webinar recording, the transcript from the live captioningtoday as well as any additional materials or slides from the presentation. and again, if you could just take 2 minutesout of your time today and fill out our survey. if for some reason the survey does notpop up when you leave the webinar today it will also be e-mailed to you. thesesurveys really do help us in developing and improving ourfuture webinar holdings. so again thank you everybody and i hopeyou all have a great day. thank you.