you're ready hi everyone good afternoon uh my name is Hillary noon and you are here for powering nonprofit purpose in the cloud I am joined by three nonprofit leaders who will do their introductions in a few minutes I'm going to kick us off today with a little bit of background uh about some research that we've conducted recently and then we're going to have a discussion uh about three different nonprofit examples of how their Journeys in the cloud uh once again my name is Hillary noon I lead ou
r Global strategy for the AWS nonprofit business I have over 25 years experience in the nonprofit sector having worked with social impact and nonprofit organizations for most of my career and my role at AWS involves working with many different nonprofit organizations and partners to learn about their obstacles as well as their opportunities that they're looking to use and harness technology for we would love to uh have you all walk away from today uh with three key takeaways the first being to l
earn about organizations at different stages of cloud maturity uh to gain a better sense of where you are your organization is in your Cloud journey and to be empowered with actions that you can take to advocate for cloud technology within your organizations we often hear from customers that this is part of the challenge not only understanding where they are but also how to proceed and how to address some of the challenges that you might have advocating internally um for for this kind of a um uh
digital transformation so just a little bit about uh AWS for nonprofits before we kick off uh we sit within the public sector division of AWS which includes uh all of our work with Federal governments state and local governments education nonprofit and healthc Care organizations specifically within the nonprofit team we support over 880,000 different nonprofit organizations around the world and this includes all nonprofit Mission types sizes of organizations and different challenges that they'r
e trying to uh to address so it's wonderful about this is we get exposed to lots of different ways in which organizations are trying to really impact the world um but we also be are able to tap into our commercial friends uh not only uh across uh our internal teams but also at events like this where we can learn from uh the aspirational work that uh some large entities commercial entities are doing and then also see how we can apply those within the nonprofit sector so I'd love to get a sense of
where everyone in the room is in terms of uh your organization's Cloud maturity um hopefully we can we have our live polling working uh if you all would get your phones out and give this a try um get that QR code plug in the code and then the question should pop up how would you rate your organization's maturity level in the cloud we give you just a few seconds to answer that all right let's go ahead and bring up the results okay cool wow we've got some oh and the the the the bars are actively
moving uh we have about half of you uh your organizations are Advanced and uh about 40% are intermediate and then um a few beginners as well which is great I think we'll have a little something for all of you in our conversation today let's go ahead and go back um to our presentation and one other question for you all so that was as an organization I'd love for you to answer a similar question applied to you as an individual we often find that the organization may be either super Advanced and yo
u might be a business leader and may not quite be um fully versed in the cloud or you might be a technical person and your organization is still not um kind of taking on that uh that transformation Journey that you'd like to see give you just a couple seconds there all right let's see where we are okay so again we've got about half of you saying you're Advanced and about 40% are intermediate okay so seems like there's some alignment between the individuals and your organizations which is um whic
h is interesting okay great thank you let's go back to the presentation all right so with that as a as an under as a basis we actually wanted to understand the answers to those questions more broadly um within the technology sector there aren't really very many reports industry analyst reports on the nonprofit views of technology so we decided to commission some research some thirdparty research using about uh feedback from about 700 so nonprofit organizations across the us to understand their m
indsets towards technology um how they think about it what were some of their biggest challenges um as well as how they make decisions about Investments and the kinds of problems that they're trying to to solve for we got a lot of really rich uh Insight from this data from this research and we used it to not only help ourselves to you know advocate for uh changes in how we help our nonprofit organization Uh custom customers but also to um formulate three mindsets and I just want to briefly Orien
t you to these mindsets um so this is you know again datadriven view of the nonprofit sector in the US about half 46% just under half are sitting in this category called embracing and embarking this tends to be smaller organizations although we do have mid and large organizations in this category as well um these are organizations where the Enterprise so like senior leadership and the Enterprise strategy of the organization does not yet um kind of embrace uh technology and kind of digital transf
ormation at its core they see it more as an operational cost and and potentially an important underpinning but separate from the core strategy but these this group is really um in a discovery mode they're trying to understand trying to educate themselves on where to start and what they should be focused on that next um mindset is something we call launching and learning this group tends to be more project oriented this is makes up half of the market and really we see a variety of small medium an
d large organizations in this mindset um so it's it's far-reaching and um very diverse as a group this is where most of our customers sit and we see that this is the type of organization where you might have one or two leaders who have an Innovative mindset and are willing to try something and they might have a little extra budget so they want to try a bud they want to try a PC or you know they've heard about um an Innovative use of technology for their mission problems and so they are willing t
o try something even separate from what might be part of the Enterprise strategy and then finally we have our innovating and accelerating mindset this is our more advanced um group they do tend to be larger customers larger organizations but we have some very small ones in here as well it really comes down to um how they view the role of technology in their mission these organizations you usually can't separate um their view of Technology from what it takes to advance their mission um and these
are these are typically organizations that do have dedicated uh IT staff and talent who are trained in the cloud so if you're interested in finding out where your organization um sits you can get um download or click into this assessment this is built off the research that we did it is um a datadriven uh assessment it takes just a few minutes and I would encourage you to do that for yourselves and then also bring some of your leaders together and take it and discuss the findings and whether or n
ot you know that that is something that you want to actually address internally in terms of how you advance your own um uh Journey so thank you um for listening to that uh the the beginnings of our of our talk I'm now excited to turn it over to Julian Thompson from the United Negra college fund is going to talk a little bit about their Journey on AWS thank you so much Hillary and good afternoon everyone it's a real privilege to be with you all uh my name is Julian Thompson and I have the privile
ge of serving as the senior director of strategy uh for a unit within the United Negro College Fund called The Institute for capacity building um if uh those of you in the crowd aren't familiar with United Negro College Fund we're a 79-year-old organization and our primary mission is to provide services supports and resources to our country's 102 historically black colleges and universities um for those of you who aren't familiar with HBCU in the audience they are a group of Institutions that ha
ve been in our country since 1837 uh they are focused on the service of formerly enslaved African-American communities and they've been doing that in a way that really has transcended boundaries and and opportunity spaces uh since their founding in 1837 uh so it's a real privilege to be a part of the United Negro College Fund where I get to work on the question how might we use new professional development new systems new communities of practice and in this case new technologies to be able to he
lp those institutions Advance their missions uh in 2019 we started to engage our HBCU Partners on the question of their footprint on the online learning SP space and when we did that we realized a shocking statistic that in 2019 55% of higher education institutions had online degree granting programs compared to just 25% of uh HBCU at that time when we asked our HBCU why they hadn't adopted online technology why they hadn't chosen to embrace a space that was clearly sort of trending in the rest
of higher education they basically said two things they said number one uh it's too expensive um there's barriers to entry when it comes to the adoption of Technology we don't have the time we don't have the capacity sometimes we don't have the subject matter expertise that we need to be able to embrace that type of technology in a way that we think we could compete with our um other higher education competitors and the second reason they said when we asked them why they didn't embrace the uh on
line learning space was that when they looked at the technologies that were available in online learning learning what they didn't see was technology that reflected their own culture their own mission their own pedagogy their own approach to student education and student learning and so because they didn't see the application of technologies that would support their institutional type they basically avoided the question of adoption of online learning at The Institute for capacity building at unc
f when we kind of came back and sort of unpacked those questions we realized that there was an opportunity to have HBCU partner with each other on the question of online technology adoption and so we developed a proposal called HBCU V or HBCU virtual which is our attempt to get HBCU around the country to Galvanize around a single system for the provision of online learning education and learning and social experiences um that can support them their students and their community unities we drafted
that proposal in January 2020 and when we sent it to our leadership at uncf they basically said you got to be kidding me this is the United Negro College Fund a nonprofit that's focused on fundraising and other activities that are related to Resource supports there's no way we're going to be able to take on a technology uh feat like the development of something called HBCU and so they told us to take a six-month walk to try to figure out how we might create the conditions for HBCU to be success
ful and then 6 weeks after that the pandemic happened and then two months after that George Floyd was murdered and we found ourselves in a position in 2020 where we could dream with our institutions what might we be able to achieve that would help HBCU LeapFrog the competition and really become leaders in the online learning space when we started to imagine the solution of reimagining black higher education what we came to was sort of three key principles number one that we wanted to focus on re
volutionary edtech that we wanted to develop a technology that would be responsive to institutional and student needs from our community in a way that wasn't replicated by the current technology used in higher education we wanted to do that through uh radical collaboration meaning we built an AS asset that was to be developed and managed by a group of HBCU in partnership with each other and then the third principle that we identified was rightful ownership that as we created this technology we w
anted it to be an asset to the HBCU that we partnered with we uh conducted a significant amount of research 3,300 hours of research including surveys and ethnographic studies and in-depth interviews to basically try to unpack and understand what is it about the HBCU space or the HBCU context that we want to try to replicate in the online learning space and then critically we brought our institutional Partners along for the ride so we identified subject matter experts at nine HBCU who have been p
artnering with us since the winter of 2020 on the development of the platform we have been on an incredible journey and as I said because we're a nonprofit organization that focuses on fundraising and resource acquisition it was hard for us to understand how we might navigate to get the type of Technology including the type of cloud technology that would help us be successful and as we've developed our journey and our process uh we've been able to really identify a group of partners that are goi
ng to help us Advance a technology that we think is going to be transformational for the higher education landscape uh we are partnered with deoe digital who has provided our project management and subject matter expertise to be able to guide and facilitate the process um as you can see here canvas is our learning management system we're using OCTA in one trust for privacy um we're using pathify to provide um uh student engagement tools um we're using uh Tableau for data reporting and when it ca
me to the question of who we would use for our Cloud technology after a long and uh evolved process we were pleased to identify AWS as the most um ideal institution or the most ideal partnership that would really work to help our institutions achieve their mission and so I'm really pleased to be a part of this panel and to share more over the course of our conversation um about why aws's Solutions ended up being palatable not only for us as a nonprofit but for the institutions we serve um to sha
re a little bit more uh from an organization that's a little bit further along in their Cloud Journey I'm pleased to introduce Kevin Fen the director of data integration and management from the Greenwood genetics Center thank you Julian I appreciate it um thank you all for uh giving me the opportunity to to share today as Julie mentioned I'm uh with the Greenwood genetic Center um and you know we are uh focused on providing clinical Diagnostic and research uh in the area of genetics for the stat
e state of South Carolina for those Afflicted with rare genetic disorders um and I think uh I'm I'm certain I'm not alone in this room uh dealing with the problems that we fac with very high volume uh High complexity and multimodal data right this is this is this is just the definition of 2023 is everyone has more data than they know what to do with uh it's it's stored in various formats and and how do we make that data actionable so this was the the problem that I was faced with when I joined u
m GGC uh in 2018 um we had basically as it says here we had exhausted the the the value we could extract from that data using our existing method so the question was how could we look uh at it differently how could we find different solutions uh and we needed something that would that would scale um as you know uh genetic data is is significant in volume and complexity so we need something that could grow uh as we continue to collect samples and process data um we need something that uh aligns u
s with the industry best practices gives us security when we're dealing with protected health information um and uh ultimately and I think again everyone can align to this uh is how do we simply shorten the time from someone asking a question to getting the answer right uh Innovation moves at the speed of data access and uh if you've got people downloading data to a spreadsheet and then you know try it it doesn't work right we need to make this data put it at the at the fingertips of our provide
rs and our researchers so they can get answers to their questions more quickly so in our particular case looking at AWS uh what we found was a library of services that that really meet all the needs that we have and all the problems that we face this is our particular solution um but but really the the the idea here is you know we have not found a single instance where we have a problem or need a service within the AWS platform that there's not a solution for um so we happen to be uh merging all
our data into Amazon Health lake so for healthcare facilities um it provides a common data model for our data to get organized and structured but really that's just step one uh really the ultimate goal is to make that data more actionable and tying it into sagemaker and health omix so if you've listened to the keynote this morning you heard a lot about generative AI so you know facilitating those kind of capabilities um and giving us access to those to those capabilities is is key um um you kno
w in the keynote this morning we also heard uh you know that we need to build with the end in mind so similarly we're we're taking that approach and and thinking about what are the outcomes that we want to facilitate the outcomes that we want to realize through this development um and so in our particular case uh you know ultimately what we're looking for is to get more patients a diagnosis uh those that are dealing with rare genetic disorders typically wait about 7 years to get a genetic diagno
sis and only about 50% % um get uh a diagnosis so we ultimately want every patient that we care for to get a diagnosis um and so by making this data more actionable right we can find patients that are afflicted with a specific disorder and find common commonly affected patients uh we can start to apply uh Advanced analytics techniques to identify new patterns of disease um ultimately increase our diagnostic rate you know above where we are today um and then through uh you know health omix and ot
her uh data analytics platforms that are available within AWS um we can make you know continue to process more data uh more complex data uh and ultimately again move our mission forward um and so at this time I'm going to turn the mic over to borhan so borhan is the CEO of rainforest connection and he's going to share with us his experience in the cloud yeah thank you very much good afternoon everyone how's everybody doing um my name is Boran Yin I'm the CEO of a nonprofit organization called ra
inforest connection um a little bit about me um I spend most of my career in the for-profit world uh my last uh company before uh rainforest connection was an e-commerce company that turned out to be quite successful in the Middle East uh Mina region um and I come from a technical background and most of the work that I've done throughout my career and certainly in and what you're about to see in in uh rainforest connection happened on the cloud so I would say um most of my companies that I've be
en involved in were born in the cloud and and dependent on the cloud quite heavily um so I figured as the last presenter make it a little bit more exciting I'm going to ask you to to listen into something it's one good way to show you about what we do is perhaps a bit of show and tell so we're about to play a a short 30 second clip of a recording in Panama uh captured from Panama in one of our projects and I'd like you to identify if try to identify how many species you think you can hear in tha
t short 30 second [Music] clip [Music] okay now let me show you what you just heard so this is a 3D representation of the sound that you just heard and using AI using artificial intelligence we can actually detect over 15 species that have occurred in this is just 30second clip of audio you can see spider monkeys there um um uh you could see cicas different types of birds all these things were just in a 30second clip of audio in fact this whole time there's a chainsaw that was going on in the ba
ckground and we can only hear it you can only hear it if I if we dim down all the sounds the human ear can actually not is unable to decipher all these different species unable to decipher the fact that there was a chainsaw somebody cutting down trees this whole time and it was only if we we actually dimmed this artificially that you were able to hear it um and that's the power of AI That's The Power of using big data and cloud and being able to identify things that normal humans cannot do and t
hat's what we do at rainforest connection why is this so important well over 14 million Acres of rainforests are destroyed every single year and it's threatening over a million species with Extinction um all these species that you see here and and and and as you know birds and amphibians and all types of all types of uh taxonomies they're vocal right one very good and very profound way to try to understand what is going on in in the in the in Forest around the world is to actually listen to them
so sound is one of those important te Technologies and techniques that we can use to actually identify species and what we do it what we use it for is to identify the presence of species and consequently the absence of species and why that's important is that it allows us to understand the state of the forest we can also use that same technology to identify threats um we use it to you see these devices that you see up there called the Guardians they're basically a mini computer with a bunch of
solar panels that sits on top of the tree canopy they record the soundscape 24/7 and they send all that information to the cloud where it gets analyzed um every single recording gets analyze we're able to identify species down to the individual song itself not just to the species type we can identify if it's a mating call or an alarming Call Etc we can tell when there's gunshots which are indicative of poaching we can tell when there's um chainsaws which are indicative of people cutting down tre
es or trucks which are indicative of people transporting or at least shouldn't shouldn't belong there and we can do all of that with the power of Technology right if you and I I've been I've been to the ground many many times and when you go down there and you're you know you're there with the local communities with local indigenous people and you see the amount of resources they have compared to the amount of land that they can protect it's astronomical difference right you'll have one example
is the TBE indigenous tribe which we work with in um the state of par in Alto Rio Guama in Brazil uh there a total of 2900 um TBE people that are there at a at a land the size of Yus National Park and out of those 2900 there's only about 30 what they call Warriors which are people that are designated to go out and do patrols so imagine 30 people trying to do a patrol for you know the entire Yus National Park size of an area right with all the complications that happen on the ground so using tech
nology like this a single device a single Guardian can monitor 7 Square kilm it can listen almost 1 and a half kilm in every direction um for mechanical sounds which you know uh trucks and gunshots and um chainsaws are are that so it's very important to have technology right and it's very important to be able to use that technology in a way where we can continue advancing it and advancing and advancing it and that's what we're doing with with with the cloud right this is our team uh um caption o
f the team that we have um it's actually me on the top right I stumbled this is this was in Peru a few years ago actually we installed the guardian device and the next day it started throwing alarms so we went out there and we actually found loggers um right there cutting that count trees and um the patrols the patrolman at the time they kicked them out and you know did all did all that all that stuff but yeah this is me stumbling on those but we're also a team on the ground We're working direct
ly with these people on the ground to try to see how best to use technology use sound uh use Acoustics to be able to help them do their job better what has this done so far well we've actually created um a platform that platform is called Arbon it's an open free available for anyone unlimited amount of data that you can upload platform that allow you to use sound to do exactly what we're doing all these learnings that we get from the field all these opportunities that we get to work with Partner
s we actually translate that into automated workflows that we put online so Arbon is one of those tools that now is being used with over 4,000 projects around the world there's over 1.3 billion analysis that have been done on Arbon to date over 145 million one minute recordings if you put that in terms of size we have almost a petabyte of data on S3 right now uh stored and it's all continuous it's probably the largest continuous collection of soundscapes in the world perhaps even in history of f
orest soundscapes and um people are using it from over 119 different countries and like I said earlier and and I mentioned about myself but also as an organization we're quite advanced in the cloud we were born in the cloud and AR architecture tells that tells that right we're using lots of AWS Services a lot of different things to ensure that we can continue offering this level of um integration to our partners and and and you know in some of these things it's actually very important to alert p
eople on the ground immediately and and so on um and with that I thank you very much and I'll hand it back to Laura all right awesome well I I don't know about you all but I I really get every I've heard these stories multiple times but it's so impressive to hear uh the different ways in which uh each of you are using the cloud and what I find really interesting too is kind of the marriage of some traditional and and in some cases human very human processes with the use of technology and the abi
lity to kind of amplify those human um uh processes with with technology um and and with that you each talked about some of the positive outcomes that you've seen but you've also encountered some challenges along the way and I what I would love to do and is get from the audience bring the audience back in to this um particular part of the dialogue before we have a panel discussion about the barriers and challenges that each of you are facing as well um with any technology implementation you may
be addressing some challenges within your organization or it could be with the beneficiaries of your mission or your partners if you all just take a a few seconds take out your phones and um answer the poll this particular poll would love to get your take on um the biggest challenges or barriers that your organization faces when prioritizing technology initiatives all right right let's go ahead and see all right so budgetary is seems to be about a third followed by lack of it or Technical Resour
ces or capabilities that's pretty typical of what we see broadly and then organizational leadership buyin yep and then overwhelmed by the choices okay really helpful thank you all let's go ahead and um with that in mind I'd love to um turn back to our panel and would love each of you to talk a little bit about the biggest challenges or barriers that you all faced when prioritizing either your current Investments or even as you kind of think about your overall work in the cloud and Boran let's st
art with you uh and just especially because yours is a little unique you're a little farther along in your journey you can talk about you know how you think about that particular question yeah definitely I think I mean looking at the poll certainly when you think of nonprofits I think but constrained budgets are you know one of our biggest issues right so we do operate under that pretense quite a bit and budgetary constraints is a big issue for us and we make sure that we keep our costs as low a
s possible and in fact AWS actually offers great tools to allow you to do that which is really helpful right being able to talk to the right people to reduce these uh these costs I think for us the biggest challenges have been less about the organizations buying because as I mentioned in my presentation we're essentially born in the cloud it was more about how we can get our partners and our clients to adopt using Cloud now if you think of the what I mentioned about the Arbon platform that we ma
ke available these are all scientists these are all biologists and ecologists these are all people that are used to lock away their data um on hard drives they're they operate in in the middle of some of the most remote area so Cloud access is very difficult for them so trying to get these people to go to a cloud approach and start using a cloud platform has been very challenging so I think for us I'm sure you hear a little bit differently with the rest of the folks but for us the biggest challe
nge has been primarily to get our partners and our customers on the cloud and making sure they're making the best usage of it and the way that comes it in many ways convincing them that it's the right way to go um there's there's many ways to do that whether it's showcasing the power of cloud and how we can make use of it or how it can save them time and so on um for us at least is that that's that's been our our biggest challenge so I think that's really important because we often f look intern
ally in terms of how am I going to you know get my leadership enrolled and it certainly came up from from all of you as well but knowing that there's also the beneficiary goals or your partner goals that you have to to keep in mind Julian would love for you to comment a little bit on kind of your experience both I know you talked a little bit about the internal um process you went through but also taking into account your students and kind of how they view this type of yeah um you know I think f
or us and for the institutions we work with the organizational leadership buyin question was a particular challenge that was important for us to really Embrace and then overcome um HBCU leaders are often times wearing a lot of hats and they have to make a dollar of uh activity happen on a dime's worth of investment as a natural part of how they operate and they figure out ways to do that very well um in terms of their traditional Mission but sometimes it can make the process of change management
particularly difficult right so when you're thinking about the adoption of a new technology the process that it takes to understand how that technology is going to be adopted understand the ownership rights around new information that can be collected the Privacy related to it um what the opportunity space is if you think about the use of that data or the use of that information long term um really does require I think an educational Journey um so for us it was really important that we sort of
start with a level of humility about sort of wanting to bring our entire Community along for the journey um because uncf was not just implementing this project for its own sake but on behalf of a group of a network of Institutions that process of unpacking challenges uncovering the Dynamics of what in each institution thought about their strategic mission and vision uh was particularly important and I think you know for our institutions as we sort of participated in that educational process it b
ecame clear number one that each of them in their own way maybe in pockets of their institution that they didn't have strong familiarity with were already embarking on some part of the cloud Journey whether it be intentional or organic and so really bringing those pieces to bear was a critical piece and then when you started to engage students and other sort of users of higher education products they're already has have all their information on the cloud aren't using non- cloud-based Services as
a natural part of how they operate and so educational Journey about not only the technology but about how students were using it ended up being particularly important for us to get the buy we needed to over the initial hurdles you emphasized education many many times and I think we certainly see that with our customers and I'm sure many of you do as well really and You by investing in that Journey with your internal um leaders I'm sure you learned a lot too along the way about some of the thing
s that you needed to account for yeah um and you know um if you're going to take on something that is asking people to dream big you have to have the patience to have people wrap their whole arms and whole spirits around that dream um and so that's the the the right and proper process to get someone that achieve something uh that's beyond their Vision or beyond their aspiration and because we did it in that way uh we now are in a process where just about every institution that started with us on
the in the research phase is now ready to implement HBCU uh next year and so that creates the conditions that we were hoping for in the initial outset is that we could get a group of Institutions not comfortable with technology adoption to embrace something that was truly world class awesome story yeah takes time up front but then you can accelerate towards the end y Kevin what about you what kind of barriers did you encounter in your yeah I think the um I think the initial and primary barrier
that that we ran into was what I would call organizational inertia it's just sort of the this is the way we've done it we will continue to do it um that way um and just you know getting everyone to see a different way of solving these problems um and then additionally working in the health care space data security and data privacy is Paramount um and and there's a sense of of security whether it's you know uh uh real or perceived in having that data close right having it on premise there's a the
re's a feeling of security um and there was there was some trepidation in in moving into the cloud um and so the way you know the way I I overcame that uh was primarily with you know small wind right it's it's if I can get them to trust me in something small right then you can gain trust when you come as juliia mentioned right with the big idea um and so you know a good example was was quick site right just a very simple way of adding uh bi to our uh portfolio of of products that we didn't have
um and just showing here's a way way we can visualize and make that data more accessible and more uh available um very easily right uh low cost low uh you know low complexity low barrier to entry um and and so small winds like that in our in our uh environment really then created trust for for the bigger ideas that we're working towards so important I think a couple things you said there the first of all the willingness to try something and start small um the fact that you already knew that this
was the right direction so you came in with your own base of knowledge which I think is important um and then the the quick site uh example I think is really good because visualization is something everybody can see and feel and it's uh it's a great way to kind of enroll people who may not be technology uh friendly or or comfortable yeah so when we've uh provided our our packet to our board in the last board meeting it was a mix of analytics from from quicksite and then the old traditional text
based and the directive I got out of that meeting was they want everything coming from here so it's an example where when you when you can provide those tools and sort of show the capability uh they can see the differentiation and and quickly gravitate towards it great example all right let's let's transition to talk a little bit about uh how nonprofit organizations get these kinds of Investments uh that might be where you are or perhaps you have already done that within your organization and y
ou're looking for the next big project um so I would love to again let's get a a poll uh of what objectives you'd like to achieve through investments in technology uh and then we'll talk to the panel a little bit about their experience in um either seeking funding advocating for that within their organization or um any lessons learned that they have that they can share um their own experiences so I'll give you all just a few seconds to answer this [Music] one all right let's see what our results
look like okay looks like about a third of you are saying oh improving operational efficiencies yes and then I think we have a tie on most of the others oh improving delivery of mission programs definitely we we heard some examples if you were in the um uh Keo this morning too about those that operational efficiencies one all right awesome so let's go back to the the slides and turn to the panel to unpack this one a little bit um you know I think uh many of us have to with our nonprofit organiz
ations we have to seek funding from whether it's foundations or government agencies or even individual donors or you're just trying to make the case to your Finance team and so how do you go about doing that and what are some of the um kind of experiences that you all have had um would love to start Julian with you um especially given the fact that this is a fairly recent effort for you in advocating for this change yeah well um I got to say if I had to take on a project of implementing a higher
education technology with hpcu and any any organization in the country I would probably choose the United Negro College Fund because for the last 79 years we've been collecting a lot of relationships from Regional and National funders who are sort of zeroed in on the question of how do you help in HBCU sort of activate against its Mission um because of that I think you know the United Negro College Fund in general hpcu um you know more broadly invest in the type of research and Communications a
ctivities that really help people understand and translate value proposition in a way that's particularly compelling so uh that's really important for us uh if your organization doesn't have a cool sweatshirt that everyone's like what's that all about that you should get one cuz um people need to know that your work is important that you believe in the the nature of what your work can do to uh change the human condition or change the nature of uh justice in our world and so that's a particularly
important piece for us and then the research piece is important as well because as we start to unpack the question of HBCU applying their mission to the current context I don't think any fun in 2023 is under any illusions that technology will have to be a part of solution sets to help nonprofits achieve their mission I mean it's just really inspiring from Kevin and from borhan to hear about sort of whether it's you know you know deforestation of the rainforest or um applying Technologies to the
health field and the genetics field that like there's a lot of challenges out there that we know technology will be a part of the solution because of AI because of the proliferation of data um the aggregation of that data and its usability to be able to solve challenges and so you've got to do the type of research I think to be able to map your Miss and your aspirations to the technology applications and once you do that you're in I think a strong Foundation to create value proposition so um th
at's been our strategy and it's helped us so far um get some of the resources we need to get the technology off the ground and then from that point you know we got to make sure that we prove that the technology application is successful yeah great point I love that mapping the mission outcome to the technology really important to help tell that story Kevin how did you do it with with Greenwood gen so so I'm an engineer so I just I did it with good oldfashioned math um so we had a we had yeah ver
y simple we had 100 uh we had 100 terab on- premise um server for uh file storage it was hitting capacity and so I went and looked and said okay well should we replace it or should we transition data storage to the cloud and so I did it just a basic 10-year cost projection very simple um and math one right um cuz when you add in not only the capital investment to to procure additional storage servers but then also the it resources to support those um uh it just came out it came out ahead um and
so that was you know the basic uh the way I started this process and then uh we were exceptionally fortunate GGC to have a a philanthropic donation dedicated towards uh data management so God bless that person and then most recently uh so we participated in the imagin grant uh program and were uh awarded uh through the Imagine Grant most recently in 2023 some funds to continue to build out our our data warehouse um so uh yeah lots of lots of things coming together but in in our instance it it re
ally came down to comparing the true cost of on premise management of services to AWS and uh it it it just came out ahead and and for those of you who aren't familiar we do have a calculator that can help you do that as well as of course um account management uh resources to help guide you through that so I what I love that about that is it's the numbers and that's really good for speaking especially to a finance team and Julian what you described was a little bit more of the I think the narrati
ve and the storytelling that goes along with that and the two things together I think are really important um and Boran I'd love to hear I know your your perspective is a little different um but would love any guidance you have for for folks given you you know you guys are already in the cloud there was no convincing there sure um but when it comes to investment how do you how do you think about that and what advice do you have for other organizations going through that yeah I mean I think for u
s especially as a nonprofit startup it's especially difficult because we don't have the relationships of big foundations or large donors that would donate every single year we don't have certainly the long-standing reputation of 70 80 plus years that that's behind us so it's it is difficult for us we tried all kinds of things we tried asking people to to pay for the AWS Bill and that wasn't very successful cuz it's not it's not a lot of fun um but I think what we discovered is it's not about the
cloud costs it's what it's about what you're creating in the cloud and how important that is to your mission how important that is to service your partners your customers Etc and if you showcase and I think it's along the lines of what Julian was saying if you showcase the true impact and story behind what you're building I think that's where how you attract funders and you attract support for it and what worked for us as well you know funders are are are a funny thing which is it's it's hard t
o get funding for the same thing over and over again at least in our experience to come back and say I have the solution a uh this year and then next year I have that same solution a I need more support for it I have the same solution a I need more support for it doesn't work very well with funders um at least from our experience um I can't speak for all funders I'm talking from my own experience I'm trying not to be a generalist here but the point with that is that I think you need to also look
at the path and the future of your solution in a way that you almost keep Reinventing it I'm not saying change your strategy uh redesign your entire product or whatever it is but make it exciting every single year right so those captivating stories those things that actually showcase what you're what you're solution is doing could be exciting to a fun that's coming in doesn't want to really get into the details of your architecture or whatever is going on but they really want to support the end
result and if the end result is clear it's exciting it's important it makes a difference I think that's how you get them well ban you've also talked in the past about um how optimization of the use of AWS resources could also be part of a story right absolutely yeah I mean I think uh we're we're without divulging too much information we're going through a a great partnership that we're trying to establish right now where that partner has somewhere around s or 8 x um their on a let's not name it
competitor uh uh Cloud but the point is there's s or 8X the cost of what we use of what we spend and in term of in ter of the resources used it's almost uh at par of what we're what we're doing um and the reason why one you know this is important for reducing your costs and being more operationally better Etc but it as um as it was mentioned it's important to be part of that story to Showcase that you're actually making the best uses of the cloud you're optimizing the cloud and your it's not be
coming just a massive cost cost center that's actually sucking in all of your res resources it's it's an important cost that's actually providing you know x amount more um in benefit and I think that that's a very important thing as part of the part of the storytelling as well yeah and I think that you know it told the right way it actually ends up feeding back into your mission and feeding back into allowing your in your staff members to focus on more Innovation around your mission which is rea
lly why you exist right so yeah I think one one last point I would mention there um when we went out on this journey to say hey you can un you can upload unlimited amounts of of data right unlimited amount of audio people were like you're crazy because you're asking people to you're financing Cloud resources you're asking people to just upload data in an unlimited way doesn't make sense and we made it make sense because we optimize it in such a way where the scalability of how much data is uploa
ded is not proportionate to the costs and it made sense um and we made that available and now we have that large uh soundscape database that that we talked about so that's awesome all right well with the a few minutes that we have left what I'd love for each of you to touch on is um some of the resources that might help folks in the audience depending on where they are in their Journey um whether those be from AWS or from elsewhere what were some of the things that you all uh leaned upon or um f
ound to be most helpful and we'll just go down the line I'm starting with you Julian yeah um you know we chose deliberately to make AWS an anchor partner rather than a sort of a tagalong partner because AWS had so much interface with other institutions we were working with other technologies that we were considering that if you brought AWS in sort of on the earlier side and then brought in their Solutions Engineers to start to ask questions what about this part of our road map what about this pa
rt of our application what about this set of decisions we're going to need to make about new tech Technologies we're going to bring in or new systems that we want to integrate that you get to sort of build in their strategic wisdom into your process rather than trying to sort of fit the cloud technology into your strategy so for us it was really important to sort of lock in with AWS knowing that the cloud is the foundation uh for so much of what of the other parts of what we wanted to do and the
n to really just keep them engaged you know what I mean um there's a team at AWS that is responsible for being responsive and so just leaning on them is was a really important uh piece um and now we're at a position where um our HBCU technology is using I think 30 different AWS applications um and all of those weren't apparent when we signed the contract uh but we've just continued that engagement process and it's led us to um some pretty phenomenal results that's great thank you Julian Kevin ye
ah so didto what Julian shared the the the solutions Architects and the nonprofit reps at AWS are are are great uh they've been outstanding We additionally um you know when you're when you're just not sure where to start I know one of the poll questions answers was um there's too many choices um so we went through a process uh called Design Lab where we we basically start with a problem statement and then AWS Architects come in and you you spend a couple of days literally just architecting how c
ould we solve that problem using AWS services and then we parlayed that a few months later into the build lab process where you take that that architecture that's been built in the design lab and you actually implement it so really handholding our teams through the process of of building it because it is it is overwhelming when you step in um and so yeah that that has been absolutely key um and then We additionally we mentioned quick site earlier uh had it on- site immersion day so to just just
literally uh putting your team in a room and spending a day going through step by step through a workshop on on how to build out that particular service so we've done a couple immersion days at GDC so um yeah I think at every step of the process AWS has been there to help guide you through the complexity of going from a problem statement to a defined Solution that's great good examples thank you Kevin and Boran wrap us up yeah I mean I don't know how much more to say after after what you guys ha
ve said but what I would say is this um the interesting thing about AWS is that it there's so many ways so many different paths that you could take to achieve a similar outcome right you could take the path of this service and this service and this service or you could use this AWS service or whatever the combination looks like there's just so many different ways to get to the same place now getting to that same place could carry a different price tag could carry different performance hits and s
o on and and and from the polls it sounds like most of you are intermediate to Advan users so I think you want to dive in into the details of what's the best path you should take for your organization and the amount of just online you know I I can't speak highly enough of of of how much resources Amazon AWS makes available in terms of people to help but if you put that aside for a second and you just look at the wealth of resources that are available online that whether it's documentation from A
WS that are very extensive of whether it's people talking about services or whatever it is I highly suggest that you dive deep into those considering the level of users that you are most of you and try to understand what's the B best path that you should take that would give you you know the the most optimized from a cost perspective from a speed perspective from delivering to what you're looking for we find these to be very helpful right um being able to educate our developers and our devops En
gineers to uh use these online resources so they can discover that best way to move forward I think that's that's one thing I would add in addition to what the great stuff that they said thank you all um just a couple more notes about resources uh the uh research that I mentioned the powering purpose in the cloud benchmarking assessment that's that first QR code there if you'd like to download it and you didn't capture it earlier uh that will give you a tool to use within your organizations to t
alk about your mindset uh we are of course we have our uh impact Lounge here if you haven't already been uh been to it it's on uh in at the Venetian on floor three in the west alve um we've got folks there both Technical and um account management resources who can uh answer your questions and or just have a conversation and there will also be other nonprofits there at different times I find that in addition to all the great things you each said about AWS the three of you are great resour resourc
es for one another and for um other nonprofits I think whenever we can create that sense of community it's really uh a wonderful opportunity we all learn um from from each of you and you all learn from one another um and to that end it's not on the the slide here but we do have uh a nonprofit specific conference that we um host actually it's uh next year will be March 20th uh in DC it's called imagine nonprofit so what whereas this of course is on a whole another scale and gives you visibility t
o lots of different Industries and learning opportunities um that conference is specific to nonprofits um and then of course feel free to just reach out online if you aren't able to stop by our um our Lounge that's always available to you as well either through this QR code or you can just visit our website so um today you know we had an opportunity to dive deep a little bit into the mindsets of nonprofits when it comes to technology we heard from our panels about their different Journeys as wel
l as um challenges and opportunities that they've faced and hopefully you each took away a little something uh that can help you uh regardless of where you are starting from so I want to give a big thank you to our three panelists thank you so much for taking the time uh to share with us
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