Bagels & Bytes Meeting Notes – August 2018

Editor’s Note: This is last year’s meeting in JRS’s space. I forgot to take a photo from our recent meetup! – CL

We are back from our summer hiatus!  We met on Wednesday, August 1 at Jewish Residential Services, which is located inside of the Rodef Shalom building on Fifth Ave.  Thank you to Paula and the JRS staff for permitting us the use of their lovely meeting room space!

A quick reminder: TechNow 2018 conference registration is open and we have tiered pricing this year, so nonprofit attendees are charged between $25 and $100 to attend, based on annual budget size.  Learn more and register at: www.technowconference.org.  (TechNow is October 3, 2018.)

Here are the notes and resources from the meeting:

• Bitcoin
  • Talked a bit about what it is and noted that there will be a breakout session at TechNow on using Bitcoin in fundraising
• Where to find someone to do an IT audit
  • Depends on what you need to have done
    • Bayer Center does strategic and comprehensive tech assessments
    • Hardware/network vendor will focus on the network and items attached to it, plus security
    • Financial auditor will have a completely different set of checkpoints and controls
• Veterans Leadership Program has several job openings
• Guidestar
  • To look up nonprofit information including 990 tax filings
• Video streaming issues
  • Having trouble streaming over cloud-based network
  • Otherwise a good experience being in the cloud
  • JENLOR is a good vendor for cloud networks
• Board portals
  • WordPress isn’t the best idea for this – search engines can still index media library even if you ask them not to in robots.txt file; have to do it through plugins
  • Boardbookit
  • Google Drive
  • Basecamp
• Google for Nonprofits Group
  • Meetup.com page
• Paper paychecks vs. direct deposit
  • 90 cents more per check for paper
  • Can do ACH through your bank for free
  • ADP
  • Paychex
• Chromebooks
  • Kind of like thin client machines – limited functionality if they are offline
  • Best for accessing Internet based apps and websites
  • Can do much less with them if not connected to the Internet
• TechSoup
  • You have to become a member, but it’s free to join
  • Pay nominal admin fee for software
  • Can add external IT representative to account so can purchase for the org
  • Be careful to read all of the eligibility and purchasing rules and requirements for each software vendor – all have different policies