jewish residential services

Bagels & Bytes Meeting Notes – August 2018

Bagels & Bytes meeting in JRS's meeting room

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
  • 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
  • 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

Bagels & Bytes Meeting Notes – September 2017

Bagels & Bytes attendees around the table, talking and laughing togetherAbout the Meetup

This was our last visit to Jewish Residential Services for this year.  (A big thank you to Paula and the JRS staff for hosting us!!) Next month, we will be back at ACHIEVA in the South Side on Oct. 4.

Hey…TechNow stuff…

If you’ve not signed up for the 2017 TechNow conference yet, be sure to do it within the next 2 weeks, before the price goes up!  www.technowconference.org

Here are the notes and resources from this month’s meeting:

Expense report software

  • Concur – $1,000/month; need web connector
  • Expensify – cannot bill against grants, but does have a QuickBooks connector available; $9/user/month
  • Lots of people are still processing expense reports via spreadsheets
  • Unit4 – variety of functions, payroll, expenses, etc.
  • ADP – has an expense report module called RUN
  • MITC tracks payroll and HR related items

Phone conferencing/bridge tools

  • One attendee looking at Zoom; less expensive than GotoMeeting; saves meetings to the cloud; price based on # of participants
  • Skype is another option, but sometimes board and staff struggle with using it
  • WebEx – similar package; stores all meetings so anyone can login and view them
  • Recommend regardless of software choice – set up some “practice” meetings prior to any important meetings (like staff or board meetings) to let people join the online meeting and work out tech bugs, get accustomed to the interface, etc.
  • Another recommendation is to mute participants on really large meetings so less background noise.

Rolling Out a New Database

  • Training is crucial
  • Walkthough all aspects of the database
  • In the first training session, go over the basics; then go deeper in subsequent sessions
  • List of procedures is a good idea – someone said “list the chapters of the book you’re going to write” meaning at least establish the headings you will need for your training/documentation/manual
  • Roll out training to power users first
  • Consider who will be doing the training – not everyone is a trainer, even if they are savvy about the software
  • Have trainees help write the user manual
  • Build the training manual as if the person reading it know nothing about the software
  • For Salesforce in particular, you can set up a practice sandbox that is a replica of the exact real database

Billing to Allegheny County

  • An interest was expressed by multiple people for batch billing software that works with Allegheny County’s billing system
  • None exists that anyone can think of

Google for Nonprofits

Bagels & Bytes Meeting Notes – August 2017

This month…

…we met at Jewish Residential Services in the Rodef Shalom Congregation building. A big “thank you” to Paula and the JRS team for hosting us!!

We will meet there once again on Wednesday, September 6 from 8:30 – 10 am. See the sidebar to the right for ways to register.

Here are the topics and resources discussed during this month’s meeting:

  • CRM for Nonprofits (Constituent/Client/Customer Relationship Management)
  • Sharing Documents with People External to Your Organization
  • Salesforce Resources
  • Migrating to Google Drive
  • Outlook + Sharepoint Desktop Version vs. 365
    • Permissions have been a persistent issue for some
    • Training is a constant issue
    • User acceptance can be slow
      • 365 is more difficult to understand – the cloud and file sharing aspects of it
      • Files get saved over if don’t change file names from version to version
    • Can embed a Google Calendar inside of Sharepoint
    • Are we pushing older workers out by all these upgrades in tech?
    • What about outsourcing to the cloud completely?
      • Internet bandwidth must be sufficient to do true virtualization
      • Off-site hosting is more $ for service, less $ for backups, maintenance, licensing
      • JENLOR is one local company that does virtualization
    • Office 365 is on TechSoup
  • LaserJet 401 Troubleshooting
    • Old printer, but hates to get rid of it because has been a workhorse till now
    • Won’t print graphics, only text
      • Maybe is an issue with Windows security?
      • Perhaps an issue with a recent Windows update?
    • Where to e-cycle if decide to ditch it?
  • Listserv Usage
    • Reminds us of VCR tapes and DOS
    • Mass email marketing tools if wanting to do one-to-many messaging (like Constant Contact or Mail Chimp)
    • Group tools if want members to message each other and the group at large (Facebook, Google or Linked group)