[Music] doing stuff with their hand activates a certain part of your brain that we don't usually use often and so the more we do that the more in touch we get with our consciousness and more present we feel making art and meditative almost it's at least you're present with your loved ones and that's really wonderful it's about using art to create a day for kids with cancer and their family and just bringing people together doing different creative things and just allowing people their creative f
reedom to have fun and make that lasting memory [Music] it's really great just everybody gets in and does their own thing and it's just a lot of fun there's melted crayon art I'm at a watercolor station they're making pom-pom monsters and pop-up cards and other like acrylic painting the families are dealing with cancer 24/7 it never stops it doesn't give you a break you never stop worrying about it you know stop planning the next step art workshops like this one give those kids and families just
one break a really healing break it could be a couple of hours but it's the moment for them to feel absolutely normal just like anybody else any other link is up monsters I enjoy coming here because the main thing that they do here is art what joy I saw on the faces of all of the people hope the guests in the volunteers as they left this workshop today for parents it's another way to help your kids to go through all those hammies I just found this experience is so rewarding and I wish that you
would have more of these I hope we can do more of them thank you for doing everything for the kids and for the family keep doing what you guys are doing as you guys are amazing [Music] hi everyone and welcome to these Google for nonprofits livestream I am Alicia I'm a program manager on the Google for nonprofits team we recently delivered to live streams on our channel one was an introduction on our Google for nonprofit program and one was on training on how to use this wave so if you miss those
you can watch the recordings on our Channel however one of the top questions that we get from nonprofits is how are harder nonprofits using GoBot for nonprofits product to be more productive to be more visible organizations what can we learn from others so I'm very happy today to be here with the kids on that foundation we have for V and Caroline superb is the founder Caroline is program manager for kids on our foundation and I'm gonna share this story they're going to share with us some best p
ractices and how they use Google products to be a very productive nonprofit that really changed since the life of thousands of families which is so video that introduces all their activities and we will really hear from then their hands-on experience so do you want to introduce yourself sure so hi everyone i am paul VEISHEA I'm the founder of kids and art foundation I started the organization almost ten years ago we celebrated our tenth anniversary last year and I'm Caroline Robbins and I'm prog
ram manager at ucsf Benioff Children's Hospital where we have a weekly art workshop so in this livestream we're gonna understand what's on our mission and activities and how Google for nonprofit products are helping these activities to be organized and developed and they're helping kids and our foundation to really be around in a very smooth way and they were really great and strong impact in the community that they are serving we're gonna share some tips and tricks we're really gonna hear from
ends on experience and then you also have the opportunity to ask for a few questions on our live chat we have our Google for nonprofit team that can help you over the chat with some product related questions but would you like to ask questions to our speakers we will save some time at the end to also answer those questions all right so I would say let's get started so I really would like to hear from you what kids in our foundation nation what's your activities and what's a story of your nonprof
it so the mission for kids in art is you know we pair up children who have been diagnosed with cancer their siblings and the care circle with artists and together they create art it's a simple mission but the whole goal is to be there for the children and the families through their cancer lifecycle which is you know we have already spared up with them while they are in treatment and even as survivors and sometimes unfortunately kids do go in hospice and so we've lost a lot of children as well so
we also have programs for families who are in bereavement so that's really the mission of kids in our to heal pediatric cancer through art it's a very powerful and important mission and how many workshops and art workshops do you organize over the course of a year or a month well we have we have two weekly art workshops at hospitals Stanford Children's Hospital and UCSF and York Children's Hospital so that's once a week a both/and we have monthly destination workshops within the Bay Area so the
y're held at creative locations like Google to add to that we also have programs for young adults you know children teens that get diagnosed we have a very special program for them and then we also do programs that are referral based so if a nurse or a social worker at the hospital sees that someone is in real need because of anxiety or just stress or they've been in the hospital so if you get a bone marrow transplant for example you might be in the hospital for 55 days and never leave the room
now that's crazy so when they see that that someone might benefit they'll call us and we will send an artist and pair them up to do some work so that really helps with anxiety so okay and I guess also it's important to have this workshop and kind of you know on recording because you're there for the families and what I was really impressed by you can see we've seen the video at the beginning we have a few pictures here that show the great work of the volunteers the great work of kids and art and
what the kids actually do produce we have like a few things are here so some pieces of art that the kids have produced and I guess this is like the video was saying a time for family just to think about something else because like when cancer and such a like a terrible situation affects a family that's everything you think about so you're there every time these families need it and what I was surprised about is that kids and our foundation is able to do these in the Bay Area supporting thousand
s of families every year with a staff of only four people that's right and they're not even full-time and they're not even before time so and I have to say with a lot of volunteers and a lot of volunteers but this means that you need to be a very productive organization you need to work on strategies for fundraising visibility and so on and this is why I really wanted to have kids an art foundation today with us because I think they can share very powerful example on how they use Google products
to become and to be an even more productive organization so when I met Caroline in pervy for the first time and they were saying that they use G suite a lot in all of their operations and what's great is that also they use a lot YouTube as we saw the video that we saw the beginning in something that kids and our foundation has produced and else to give us a lot of visibility and also to explain a lot about the mission something that sometimes like reading on the website would not be as powerful
as watching a video seeing what kids are doing what what it means for a family to get skin and foundation support so maybe do you want to tell us how you use Google products to organize for example a workshop what do you do what's your like the use of these products to achieve the mission well with the weekly workshop everything goes into a document and so I named the document and dated so all the photographs from the workshop go in there I do a write up every week we put all the program number
s in there which is essential to keep and we do all the volunteer information in there as well and their paperwork and all the sign ins so that we have a complete document of everything from that every single workshop that we do and same as we explain we have so many different workshops right so what the G suite has helped us to do is really get organized so we have a team folder that we've created like just kids in our foundation and then within that we have a kids in our programs and within th
at we have a ucsf folder a Stanford folder destination workshop so whatever programs we have and then whoever is in charge of them so everyone has access to them and its really been a lifesaver because anytime for example I am NOT their day to anymore I was the executive director I just stepped out of the roles so now I'm the chair of the board so anytime I need something to give to the board I don't have to look I know exactly where it's going to be and everything is dated and I know who owns t
he folder so if I need something I just need to connect with that person so I think organization wise it's really helped us a lot so it's a great place to find photographs as well which you use for all sorts of everything's for everything and / in social media and for our website and yeah and that's just folders right means there's so much else means we use g3 let's say emails for example right so setting up the emails we have given an email to everyone right all this is something that is very i
mportant yeah right because which is rate for nonprofits you can give emails with the domain of your knowledge that's right that's something that helps a lot in terms of the branding of your organization the visibility and also the collaboration among all that I look professional and look professional you know for me the main reason was even if you're a volunteer let's have a volunteer at kids on our org right and if you are partnerships not just when you have that people outside just think you'
re professional you have to treat you in a different way and we couldn't have done it if we didn't have access to just have multiple emails right and even with the team we have groups that we've created because as we keep adding more people it's just you're bound to forget someone you know when you're when you're putting everyone in so we just have a group for teams and then now with the board as well we just created a group email for the board you know nine people on the board you are you don't
want to miss anyone out our and that's just that's been very helpful for us and it was really simple to set it up as well so right yeah I think you don't you get two more response as well when you have a domain absolutely absolutely and that's what I mean my profession I think in the past you know people would be like I don't want yet another email right everyone's scared of like having to make too many emails to look at and we said we have we need it we just have to if you come in as a certain
role even if your volunteer you need to have a it's not email because it's important for communications with donors absolutely companies and even for yeah as you said for donors if you receive an email from poor Viet something else you know they're like who is she and why she talking about it's an art but if you support yet kids are not dot org they're like okay I'm legitimate right yes I think it's really important so that's great so we're so like Jesus with helping you with communication mm-h
mm inside and within your your foundation with your donors the use of groups like it's it's great it's fundamental when you when you have people volunteers when you have maybe an event to organize when you want to make sure that the communication goes out to everyone in your board it's important that you create group of emails so instead of sending emails to people one by one you can create a group where all the people on your board are or for example where all the artists volunteers in your cas
e are let's say that kids and our foundation wants to organize a workshop in two weeks and you're looking for an artist to volunteers and to run the workshop they could maybe just simply send an email to the group of volunteers and see if anyone is available that's great that's powerful it's very productive you could do the same maybe with a with a Google Form let's say that after an event you would like to get a feedback on the event or maybe you would like to recruit more volunteers you can us
e Google Forms ask people to fill in their information and just share what they would like to do for the org and we do that with surveys after each year we try and send a survey out to families who participate with us as well as the artists just you know five three or five questions just to know how the season went if there was anything they wanted us to change any workshops they wanted us to bring back like just simple stuff but the survey really helps us whoever answers at least we get a sense
of okay what's happening and sometimes of course it does have a remind people and they will this is a community that really wants us to succeed so they're happy to fill the surveys so yeah the surveys are great but what's something you said earlier about events every time we do you know once a year a big event in our organization we made sure we have an email that is that so last year we create an email that's a ten year celebration at kids in our org just because you know it's again for me com
ing from design background branding is really important important you know we needed to make sure that anytime anything went out people knew this was about the 10th year anniversary and we were talking about that so so that has really helped us as well and we really used the folders and for it for the event as well they were really really helpful for for the art cataloging and just everything was in different folders so we could be more organized that way yeah and you mentioned also the use of s
preadsheets through that's a lifesaver so for example for example with the destination workshops we have a parent ambassador who is in charge of a destination workshop and so she is the one who sends out emails to all our families and our social workers every time we have a workshop and then our executive director sends emails out to artists but we have this Google spreadsheet that's for the entire year so we every time we do January is this February this so it's all you know planned for the yea
r and that really helps us the data as well because at the end of the year we create that pie chart and everything in there to let us know a how many workshops we did how many people participated who were no-shows how many artists how many volunteers because at the end of the year when we do the impact report that's where we get all the data from so it's it's a lifesaver for us we had 1,700 children and their care circles at the treatment centers last year and so this is the information we we ga
thered from all our spreadsheets and it's important to out these numbers rise especially to show the impact that you that you had for fundraising I guess and yeah we're very proud to to be able to help you achieve in this mission well and the spreadsheets are not just for the workshops you know as I said the board and even to for when we decided to get our program into the hospitals we did it as a pilot and so Google Spreadsheets that's where we did a cost structure you know how much is it going
to cost us to do a pilot right and that has really helped us just grow because each year from when we started to now you know with inflation or whatever we've been able to keep adding and see where we started where we are and also for a grants so we use the spreadsheet to create a budget and so every grant you apply to they ask for what's your budget and you know how are you gonna use the funds that's what we do we use the spreadsheet and you know Excel and spread luckily they work with each ot
her so we can do that so so that's how we use the spreadsheets um that's good I think this is a very good best practice in various cases for other nonprofits because I don't know the like I think there are challenges that all nonprofits at different stages of their life face and it's important to hear how other nonprofits solves those challenges so how do we improve our brand how do we make better reporting how do we draft better grants proposal so that's a very powerful example that you're shar
ing I think I forgot the chain of thoughts but just talking about problems that you were saying right the biggest problem we had was art we have so much art that gets generated every workshop right and it's it's a great problem to have but then we need a system because we were like how are we going to document all this art and how do how do exhibitions do it how do museums do it so luckily that's when Caroline joined us two years ago and she is an artist and she's worked you know that's been her
background and she used Google Drive Google suite everything for the first time in her life just two years ago and she is an expert now but but the reason I even bring it up is she looked at everything that was there and she's like okay looks like the spreadsheet will help me get our art catalog together and be like what are you talking about now yes so we um well I was I was guided but I literally didn't have never used droid before so I did find it quite easy to navigate and sort of try diffe
rent things so it was easier and so I photographed all the art and created a spreadsheet to be cataloged every piece of art and it has its catalog number and year and then we have this story which of course is very important the story of the of the young artist that did the work and we exhibit and even then we can create a new spreadsheet for the different exhibitions and copy on to the pieces that we give to the exhibition it's really made easy because now what happens is from 2018 read we are
doing many exhibits like so for example whenever we do art someone might say like in vidi I had invited us to put of art we had lots of galleries they were our kids and our artists art is put up but now that everyone knows how to use the spreadsheets it's really organized so far we have a master spreadsheet for our art but then we have one for each individual exhibit so nothing gets lost and we know what went out and what's coming back in right and it's important not to get things lost because t
hey'll they help you and I think it's it's part of it it's part of what you do and it's important to catalog that and maybe use it like in in like some try and even this book so we created these books right and this is all the kids art and it's a coloring books and you name up the kids yes yes and and that's important something that if you don't catalog yes you will not know right name age and most importance the story right so each of these children are so you know they're going through so much
in their life like we have kids from 2 to 26 because most children get diagnosed with cancer at 2 or 3 and you know some of them have relapsed some of them have gone through transplants we have kids who've been in treatment for almost 11 years of their life that's a story right and they are so brave and then they come up with something like this it's like you know that's that's the whole thing is like art can when you look at this you don't see it's a cancer generally right you just see the art
and that's really the mission like what we do we want to show the child as a child and not as a cancer patient and that helps us do that's them and we like to think of it as well as giving the art wings yes and it's so empowering for the for the children to see their art as a card or in the coloring book and the families and mostly siblings too because the siblings are usually the silent warriors in all of this they can interact from here to there and everything their life gets changed so when
they get to participate with us and then they get to see their art in different places it makes serious difference so yeah right and like when we're discussing we're preparing we like this live stream we're really thinking about how many things you can do and how many things you have to do right to run an organization like this how productive you need to be and what was really surprising to me was the use that you make of YouTube YouTube is sometimes perceived as complex as like as a tool that r
equires a lot of time to be maintained it takes time it takes a lot of resources to produce powerful videos actually the majority of the youtubers and these are successful youtubers just shoot their videos with their phone yeah right so it's a myth that we have really to bust and I think it's an art is working very well in this as well yeah a YouTube channel powerful videos videos that have very different objectives in their story tellings they tell the mission they show what you're doing they s
hould the work of volunteers they show the story of your nonprofit which is also very important to understand where why we're doing all of these so how do you maintain your YouTube channel do you have volunteers helping you to do that and would you have just like any piece of advice you would like to share with a nonprofit that was maybe thinking about delivery about like shooting videos or like using YouTube for branding and didn't start yet if you haven't started yet I would say started right
away because you know it's an extension of our brand and what we do is is simple but it's harder to explain it's like you know if people don't get it they say oh you're just another art class we're not that right and people think oh it's a nice-to-have whereas once you look at the videos people realize it's a must have they also have simple videos that we have our interns do and these are student volunteers and we will just tell them same thing take your phone and just ask three questions and re
peat the three questions to everyone at the event and then put it up right yeah so it's it you don't have to have some major or a degree in creating videos you can just do that another way we also do it is we interview artists and we tell them to do a selfie video and send it to us and then we put it up so I think the three try and make sure any rent we go to or any rent we host we will make sure there's a video and that we will put it up doing I think it's important also to think about videos i
n a very broad way yeah all right not only about creating a professional video that shows what you're doing then it's great and it's powerful but also documenting a watch shot using that vlog for example showing what you're doing or like what you do to organize a workshop interview in the air tastes and that can easily be done with a with a smartphone right like one of the like normal smartphones that we all use and also our volunteer training right so we created a volunteer training and you kno
w just putting that up out there really saved so much time for us means now we have that we've created it it's up there we can add that link in all our workshops and people to just go and look at that because every time anybody comes to volunteer with us they have to have gone through training it's the hospital of course HIPPA laws you have to know what you're doing and getting into and just simple things and we were so happy that we could just post it somewhere and it's you know our branded Cha
nnel right so it's our content and that just makes a huge difference for us saves a lot of time in onboarding yeah yeah absolutely I think onboarding is perfect word not only just for them and I've also made it a rule for even our board members like everyone has to go and check everything that we have they go on our YouTube channel see what we have because if you're not familiar with it how are you gonna you know be passionate about the mission right so it's been great we just send them the link
and also for grants it's been great to help for us because the video that people saw earlier and the other videos since they're on a channel we just add the link and that really helps when someone's giving us a grant to see that we're really professional we've been doing this for a while and we're here to stay if they gave us money we're not going to just fold it right yeah and really all to see the activities right so like when we were talking about the first time we met but what keeps on arts
is doing the first thing we're good at Caroline did with me was to share the pictures and shared the video and say this is what we do it's I guess like unless you experience such a terrible thing it's very difficult for people to understand what it means for key value absolutely sorry yeah what it means for a family to you know spend an afternoon with artists and just think about something else and I think the power of your videos just show exactly that power of your pictures just show is that
exactly that videos are the powerful the most powerful thing and I'm with the music as well I think at but it's just it's just seeing its visuals and the sound and it's coming from the children the volunteers the artists that's very direct and I think it brings in more volunteers as well when they see the videos and it does something else so Caroline on top of being a program manager she also does a lot of our special programming you know like filling forms to being waited for you know a talk or
for writing mag magazine articles or whatever and that really helps her because everything is in one place she can really go either to the drive to get get the images or to the YouTube to get the links or you know whatever else she needs and then just send it off and fill the form and I think that's really made our life easier earlier when I started it and when I was getting started everything was like all over the place right if someone would ask me for something I would be like where is it yo
u know how am I going to find it so now it's like everyone knows the flow and another important thing for the videos for us is research because we're trying to focus a lot on art is healing in advocacy as well as in research there's very little research and so we're trying really hard to use YouTube videos and try to do more videos that are easy for people to understand but show the research behind it because there's not a lot so how do we make that happen and I think videos and you know moving
images and just words really capture people sometimes it's hard for them to keep reading a lot yeah yeah yeah so maybe my last question then we can see if we have some questions from the audience but what's the use you mentioned that you never worked with Google before we're Google tools before joining kids on our foundation so what's the one piece of advice you would give to a non-profit that has just started maybe doesn't really know where to start with Google for nonprofits what's your what's
your kind of suggestion maybe I will answer it first and then I will let Caroline add on to that I think when for every nonprofit I think this is I will say it's a great resource for us it's definitely been a lifesaver because we've had we've been able to grow you know even though we have four people we have a lot of core volunteers parent ambassadors and then other volunteers we wouldn't have been able to be so seamless as VR and so for any nonprofit whether you're small or big I think just th
e thought of that the fact that you can be seamless look professional and fine things when you need it I think that right away should be you know a simple way to say just go and do it now because how many times have the board members ask for numbers and you're like I don't know where they are that's you will you won't have that problem if you if it's all organized at least it's made of my life easy yes for a message would be not to be overwhelmed because if you're somebody like me that his backg
round is not in technology I was like oh I didn't I didn't want to have to stop my involvement with kids on art because I knew that I wanted to get more involved I think it really helps to have somebody to start you off and guide you but I think that it's easy to navigate and you can spend time just working things out and that's coming from me so this given time and a little bit of guidance I think it's really something that becomes your friend and it's really enjoyable you just learn more and m
ore and I'm still learning I ask purview less and less about thing yes but it's been it's been really great and it just makes me feel so much more organized and I want to do more and set up new files for this and spreadsheets so it's been exciting and that's like what you were saying don't be overwhelmed what it means is start instead of thinking products think about the problem that is currently you're not facing and how the products could help you to solve for that problem so if you're facing
like a challenge where you would like to have a better branding of your nonprofit spread your mission then maybe start from YouTube if you would like to make your organization more collaborative more organized and you really need those data then maybe start to dig in a bit more into Google Spreadsheets alright step-by-step yeah the products have different scopes and they sold for different issues so it's important to first understand what you're trying to do and then leverage on the product and
I'm glad you said that because now when I look at it we have pretty much used every bit of Google for nonprofits including the space but we did start with one thing at a time one thing at a time because there was just no way for us to even know what we needed until we really got situated of course every nonprofit has so many needs the biggest problem is you have you don't have that many people who can do everything or you don't have that many funds to do everything the fact that this is a free c
ompletely free service we didn't have to worry about like adding more people or we didn't have to worry about all these little things where you you know keep adding dollars every time you spend on something so having had that at the back of a mind we weren't in a hurry to adopt something right away right means when you're trying to buy a product you have to understand everything and then you'll make sure you use everything right with this because we knew it was there for us we could adopt it and
make it work for our needs and that really helped us knowing that okay now we have we understand you know what we can do with emails and the groups and all of that okay we really need to get on doing X or Y and it's really helped us have like a more methodical process behind this so yes I always sometimes think as well that it's a problem but there is a solution so you will find a way to organize it or find the solution to the chat in there somewhere I will say you need someone in the organizat
ion who is spearheading it no it has to be someone otherwise it's it's difficult to just tell everyone go do it on your own someone who keeps by directions you need you need one person who sort of you know the column column the ringleader than someone else we're heading it because otherwise just creating a processes could be hard you might suddenly get like five people using it in five different ways so you do need like one person like an admin but one person who has really thought it through as
to how they want to use it and then apply towards organization that would be my recommendation for sure and we have two different weekly programs and we found it really easy to have everything organized in the same way yeah exactly because we could have done it kalabaw yeah yes we could have done it differently yeah but we've made sure that everything's done the same way yeah we are a question from tribe or and livestream what did you do to ensure your board members use their domain you know in
stead of their personal email I haven't I cannot that's been a big struggle and that's something that where I think the G suite is not working for me right now because I have nine board members and only one and myself we have kids on our org email the others don't and some of them have a gmail account so that makes it easy but some of them use their work email so every time we send them a file even though they are you know they can edit they can edit they can see the folder they still need acces
s so it's been a friction right now we are trying to figure out what to do but yes I'm sorry Trevor I haven't been successful and filled Trevor is asking when rolling out geez wait did you work with a consultant did you used educational resources from Google how did you approach this just like I started the nonprofit not knowing I was really starting a non-profit I just went for it then I had a person a technical person who gives us ten hours a week of his time and frankly that was the best deci
sion I made you know everyone thinks that that's not important but having someone who has the technical abilities just made life so easy but I did ask him this question before I got here and he said that it's minimal even on his end it's like so simple for him to add and remove things that you know between him and my him and me we've set up everything by ourselves so your suggestion would be by one person is there a point of contest and another person that's part of the org that kind of saw over
seas it was about the absentee and so he and I are the gatekeepers you know over over gatekeepers so that if anything you know needs to be done or happens we know what happened and we can sort of going and sort of solve it but I would highly recommend you know what nonprofits there are people always willing to give you expertise that's expertise I would ask for you know and that's who we feel that we can go to yes with questions and that's the nice feeling to know that there's somebody there tha
t can help absolutely right so if there is no other question from the audience we can maybe prop up here and I really wanted to thank you for being here for your time and for sharing your precious experience I think it will benefit a lot of nonprofits out there again this is a question that we always get what are other nonprofits doing and I think you shared very powerful examples and again you organized two workshops awake you organized very big events you changed life of thousands of families
and you're only for permanent stuff not even full of tiny people so it's incredible and thank you really for experience oh my god I mean I have to say that it would have been hard to do everything we've done and the growth that we've had with our workshops without knowing that we have this you know G suite I'm not just saying it because I'm here to talk about it but it has really helped as I have brought in more people with diverse backgrounds we work with artists all the time and not all artist
s are very technical right and which is fine I mean it has been really simple for us to sit down and do a you know one hour just go through everything everyone come to the laptop this really becomes a workshop it is they everyone sitting around or hangout you know we use hang out a lot we just do hang out and say okay everyone look on the right do you see the six little squares that's what you can do so so anything like that it has really helped us to expand our mission so this really makes us s
uper proud and for me I started as a volunteer and now I'm using Google Drive as a program manager yeah that's great thank you so much again and thanks everyone for watching and yeah we lost some new nice dreams in the near future so we'll keep in touch thank you very much thank you
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