Using Microsoft Teams for Nonprofits

welcome everyone who's joining us to the community I.T innovators webinar using Microsoft teams at non-profits today we're going to give you some tips on using this multi-function tool better we will provide a mini case study from non-profit practitioner guests from housing Alexandria so you can learn from your peers experiences and if you have Office 365 then you have access to teams Microsoft's tool for chat video conference and calendars but teams does a lot more and integrates with lots of o

ther tools beyond the Microsoft Office Suite so that's what we're here today to talk about and hopefully give you some good tips my name is Carolyn Woodard and I'm the Outreach director for Community I.T and I'll be the moderator today I'm very very happy to hear from our experts so Alyssa would you like to introduce yourself yeah thank you so much I am really excited to be here as well my name is Elisa Mondragon I am the Vice President of Operations here at housing Alexandria um I oversee strat

egic operations for the entire business corporate management leadership coaching Finance HR resident services RIT um so a little bit of everything um and I've been with the organization for six years and throughout my tenure here I have helped guide the transition work from more of a startup board-led organization to a sustainable company that can serve Alexandria for years to come that's great thank you I'm so glad that you're here um Alessandra would you like to introduce yourself sure hi my n

ame is Alessandra or Ali Brolin and I joined housing Alexandria as an operations associate in last November um I support our business operations through tasks like scheduling calendar management file management and stalking the office with snacks and supplies lots more stuff as well um I also assist Elisa on major projects like our upcoming move to a new office and I'm very happy to be here to talk about teams which I have found useful in a lot of my work including the examples that I just gave

great thank you so much for being here and I wanted to give you guys a chance to talk about housing Alexandria and tell us a little bit more about your organization yeah thank you so housing Alexandra is a non-profit Community developer committed to creating and preserving quality affordable Housing and Community focused spaces to empower our residents and benefit Alexandria's neighborhoods uh like Elise has said oh she might not have mentioned actually we have a staff of about 15 so we're not t

oo big um and we currently operate on a hybrid work structure though all team members are required to be in the office Tuesdays and Thursdays and then one more day a week up to each team Member's Choice and then everybody works two days a week at home so teams has been a vital tool for that work structure the ability to chat quickly and informally or jump on formal meetings with video on and we'll talk about a lot of the ways that it's helped us a lot but it's it's really important with that kin

d of hybrid work structure no for sure and I think we're all going to be able to talk about that a little bit later so thank you so much for sharing that um Courtney I know that you just hopped on um I'm gonna give you a chance to um get yourself together and um I was just going to introduce myself um I am the uh marketing director for Community I.T and the Outreach director so I helped moderate these webinars I um before I worked at Community I.T I also worked in several different non-profits f

rom small to large and I was responsible for I.T at a couple different places um which people will laugh at me now for saying that but it is proof that you don't have to be the I.T person to be able to oversee an I.T Department um and have it work so I know what nonprofits are going from through from the back end as well as from now working with Community I.T and supporting non-profits um and with that I could turn it over to Courtney if you would like to introduce yourself hi I'm Courtney Carro

ll I am the centralized services manager with Community I.T I um I've worked in i-team for 12 and a half years I worked at a municipality for um uh my local city and I have also um I'm excited about uh this webinar because teams has played a vital role especially with the pandemic and we were asked or moved two teams um right when it started and it has been very vital in completing day-to-day work and team meetings and things like that not only for my previous job but now that my job is work fro

m home permanently um it's been vital and getting to know my team learning my new job with the MSP uh Community I.T and I couldn't be happier with it and the mini opportunity or the many features that it provides for collaborating and and working together yeah I know I was so happy that you were available to be on this webinar today because I know that you have used teams and I get a lot out of it so I'm really happy that you could join us and um so I already introduced myself and I want to intr

oduce before we begin if you're not familiar with Community I.T a little bit more about us we're a 100 employee owned managed services provider so we provide outsourced I.T support we work exclusively with non-profit organizations and our mission is to help nonprofits accomplish their missions through the effective use of Technology we're big fans of what well-managed it can do for your non-profit and we serve non-profits across the United States we've been doing this for over 20 years and we ar

e technology experts so we are consistently given an MSP 501 recognition for being a top MSP and it's an honor we received again in 2022. um we are vendor agnostic when it comes to our clients so in that we don't have agreements with vendors so we don't have motivation to put clients in a specific tool because we're reselling it we get a benefit from that however we do think of ourselves as the best of breed MSP so it's our job to know the landscape what tools are available reputable widely used

and we make recommendations on that basis for our clients today we're talking about a single tool through Microsoft which is a cloud Port platform that many nonprofits are using so today we wanted to give you some insights based on our experience and that of our guests and many of our clients there are lots of reasons why nonprofits might choose to be a mostly Microsoft workspace once you make that choice Microsoft makes so many products that integrate that it can influence your choices after t

hat that it's your platform and teams I think is a good example of a portal that lets you you know into the world of all the other different tools and applications so we're going to talk about that a little bit more on so if that describes your organization you've come to the right place I wanted to say for the record that Community it does support Google workspace we support all Mac shops as well and we have some webinars our website that describe that kind of management and even managing a hyb

rid environment so it can be done but today we're going to focus on this tool teams and talk about the ways to get the most out of it and all the apps and products that integrate with it okay so our learning objectives for today are what teams can do and how you do it on teams um we wanted to learn about teams uh learn tips on how to use teams better Beyond just the chat understand how to select teams as a tool or a team's types tool so housing Alexandria is going to go through with you kind of

a little about how they made their decisions to use teams as much as they do all right um so now we are going to start off with a poll we like to start with a poll get things going so this question is how long have you used teams okay so the options are we're thinking about starting using teams we just started this year we started seriously in 2020 I put that in there as a you know potential year that you might have moved over to using teams a lot more than you had before and then another option

is you have always used teens like as long as you have been able to and then another option with um not applicable so you're here for some other reason you're not with an organization that uses teams but you're trying to learn about it um Elisa could you read the responses sure happy to um so 17 of you said thinking about starting uh 22 said you just started this year um like many of us we started seriously 53 uh in 2020. uh five percent have always used teams and three percent said not applica

ble all right great thank you so so much um so that's a pretty good bell curve there um and I think we weren't surprised um that a lot of people a lot of organizations started really using teams uh when they had to go remote and it was a good way to you know keep in touch and keep some of those office interactions going all right so we actually have another poll um that can help us learn a little bit more about you um also which is how big is your nonprofit what size is your non-profit um and of

course your non-profit could be in different stages of growth like you could be a large non-profit that acts kind of like a startup you could be a startup non-profit that's growing quickly like you're small now you're going to be growing um you could be a kind of middle-aged middle of the road non-profit that's been doing what you've been doing for a long time and are using teams as well for that so the options are you are a one to ten person non-profit and 11 to 25 staff non-profit 26 to 100 s

taff 101 plus or not applicable and Ali would you mind reading the results sure um 22 said their nonprofit is one to ten people 21 said their nonprofit is 11 to 25 people 37 said their nonprofit is 26 to 100 people 17 said their nonprofit is over a hundred people and three percent said not applicable all right thank you thank you so much all right and so now we're going to um get along into a little bit more information about what teams does I know we have a bunch of questions coming in um and s

ome people have some pretty specific questions about um teams features so I'm going to ask you all to kind of hang tight for a moment we're going to go through some of the things that it does um and then we're going to have the case study from housing Alexandria and if your question still hasn't been answered at that point we will have q a at the end and we'll go back through these questions so if you put your question in and we haven't answered it yet uh don't don't worry we're going to get to

them all right so what do seams do so hopefully all of you on this uh webinar are familiar with it but um we like to think of it as a portal into the Microsoft World um you can do calendar phone video chat chat um web you can do webinars through teams we're not doing that today but um it's possible I've been on them you can share files with your colleagues in or outside of your organization giving them permissions to edit or View files that you've shared with them the files are not actually stor

ed in teams they're stored in a different Microsoft application called SharePoint but one of the cool things about teams is you don't really need to know that you can just share them with your colleagues in either a chat or a meeting and your colleagues can access it through teams and they never need to know that it's in SharePoint either you can add other Microsoft apps uh integration is easy and it's it's built in as many Microsoft tools do integrate with each other you can create internal tea

ms So within the team's app you can create like a mini team that's like your Finance team and then you can add the people that are on that team um you can also have one-on-one chats with people or one-on-one calls with people you can use teams for your business phones one of the cool features about it is you can set away or Focus time so you can kind of have it operate as a admin assistant for you and telling people when you're available for calls or not people can schedule you know your colleag

ues can schedule time on your calendar internally um it's just full of really useful tools but I know Courtney you were I'm going to talk a little bit about the end of this slide some of the things about teams it can be overwhelming yes so teams can be complicated in the workflow that it offers in it can make Con conversations files tasks different things that you're working on hard to find and also it's really hard to get different teams and different groups to use teams consistently we've I've

found in many situations that I've worked with and I think many people on the registration questions also mentioned that like how do I get everyone at my organization using teams and I know that I've worked at organizations too where it seems like half the people are still like you need to email them and half of the people are like just chat me on teams so that can definitely be something that's a struggle um so here we have a Graphic with a little bit more we put Microsoft teams there in the c

enter of this little spider web um and so you can see from this graphic all of the different things that you can integrate with Microsoft teams or that you can access through teams so I don't know Courtney would you like to talk a little bit more about that from this um graphic we are going to show on our next slide we have a Graphic that shows you kind of more what teams looks like but this is more of the overview in Microsoft world of all of the things that it connects to so yes um when you cr

eate you're able to use teams to create team or teams you can in teams you can have a uh once you create a team you can share and create a SharePoint site when that team is created and as part of that it allows you to go through many of the documents that um you can use as part of that team for whatever purpose it is for projects um so Microsoft Word access PowerPoint and you can use collaboration with those you can build and use reports for different things which will tie your teams to uh Power

bi and analytics and then for other you can also View and sync your see your calendar from the teams from Outlook and Outlook and something I love is having the teams on your phone so you can like if you somebody has scheduled something with you and you're like wait when was that a point when was when was I going to meet with that person you can see it right um from your phone when you're out and about um so all of those of course it's making it this easy also makes it a little bit complex and

can be overwhelming um all right so speaking of overwhelming here is a slide with um a a little bit more about what you will see when you are in teams and so I thought for um people who are a little bit more Visual and wanted to see like well what are you talking about with teams and if you haven't seen teams before or if you have and you don't know all of these different pieces that are on there um you can see the different things that you can do so um if you look across the top I'm not going t

o read all of them to you but you can see um this was this is one that always catches me is up under where you're um where your photo is your profile that's where you can change a lot of the settings um and set you know yourself as a way Etc um you can search this is one that I use all the time so as we were seeing before somebody has shared a file with you um instead of having to go into SharePoint um and look for it that way you can think like that was in that meeting and it was um it was Cher

yl who shared it with me and so you can go in and I think it was called this you go into your search and you can pull up um the the file that you were looking for so I find that extremely helpful and it will find files chat people it it searches across the different um aspects of teams um there in the middle you can see add tabs I know I think Courtney you were going to talk about that that's where you would add the different apps that you're connecting through teams is that correct that is corr

ect um you can add or you you're able to um add personal apps you're able to add apps from the App Store if they're not already downloaded so you can view uh when you hit the three dots to view or add apps you can uh if you only one app at a time and it always shows your most recent app that was used that makes sense and I think in this um slide as well it kind of shows you power bi someone has added that um here right at the top and so it makes it easy too that when you're then if it's somethin

g that you use a lot like you're always going to power bi to show reports Etc it's right there in teams and you can access it there from from this page um you know you can start a new chat you can hear over here on the left where you see every team has channels um this is what we were talking about before you can set up a sub team that is like your finance department or your marketing department or a team that comes together to work on something that might be a temporary project team as well and

you can add people to that and then they have you know their their within that world they all have access to the things that they're that they're sharing there um move around teams you can switch between your activity feed chat meetings um your calendar your notifications alerts when somebody has um mentioned you or responded to something that you were chatting to them we had a question already coming through q a how can you change those um settings so that you're alerted when you've been um th

ere's been a response like in a team so we'll talk about that a little bit later find personal apps as Courtney was saying you can add apps here that you use a lot um and so all of this is available this little kind of like a site map of the things that you can do once you're in once you're in teams okay and then we just also wanted to kind of quickly go over this isn't we've mentioned SharePoint a couple of times SharePoint and OneDrive this isn't a webinar about SharePoint or OneDrive we do ha

ve a webinar on SharePoint that we did last summer you can go back and look at that but I thought this was a great graphic because it kind of shows you this interconnection or certain maybe sometimes circular logic around using teams as your portal where you share these um this content with others and so um you know we don't have time to get into it completely today but one Drive is where you know when you share save something it's saved to your OneDrive your individual um folder and then you al

so have access to SharePoint where you might have files that are shared with you from someone else's folder or another teams folder I don't know Courtney if you wanted to um a little bit better explanation than my uh quick explanation there as I understand it so teams main focus is I would say um the the collaboration being able to do the meet to meet the meetings face to face being able to tie a whole lot of different data and apps together OneDrive focuses on documents uh as it works as a docu

ment repository and SharePoint can be a hub of various I guess sites documents um different ways to present data or information as a as as more of a website so they allow for working they can all work together but at the same time they all have their separate features and functions that are provided and I think it's just so I can't stress enough how useful it is when you are working on a document collaboratively like the slides that we worked on uh for today's webinar I shared those from our Sha

rePoint with housing Alexandria with Elisa and Alessandra and we were all able to work together on these slides um and put them together even though they resided in our SharePoint at Community I.T so it's just but again like nobody really even needs to know where they are we just all were working on them together so I feel like that's a very um useful feature of this um but if you do know more about how your SharePoint is set up at your organization of course you can do more sophisticated things

all right so now we are going to launch another poll um and this is uh we're going to ask you how you are using teams um so are you using it and this is a multiple choice so you can click all of the ones that apply to you so are you using internal chat are you using uh video meetings external and uh internal are you doing file sharing using it as a portal to SharePoint and OneDrive which you just mentioned are you using it for team Knowledge Management so this is something that housing Alexande

r is going to talk a little bit more about and we had some questions about setting teams up to help you with workflow for different tasks that you're doing um and are any of you using it as your only phone system so you take all of your phone calls you don't have an office phone anymore you're not maybe even in an office and you use teams you have a team's number and you use that for external calls as well as for internal calls um and a webinar platform um are you using it to do webinars or is t

his not an applicable question and um Courtney would you mind reading the results from this here says um of those using team 65 are using it for internal chat 76 for video meetings internal and external 52 for file sharing um portal to SharePoint and OneDrive 32 percent to team Knowledge Management 10 as it's your only phone system internal and external 14 webinar as a webinar platform and 13 that was n a or something else okay sounds great thank you so a lot of organizations using a lot of the

different features um okay so next we are going to turn it over to housing Alexandria so um Elisa and Alessandra would you like to take us through your case study of how you chose teams and then some little tips on how you're using it yeah happy to do that um thank you so much um so I wanted to start with where we as an organization were before we were using teams before we were using SharePoint so prior to January 2020 we used a shared Drive which we accessed via VPN to store all of our files a

nd work collaborative we had in-person meetings I think everyone prior to the pandemic was used to going to people's office have visitors collaborate in person and we used a third-party conference call line so it was just like a Free Conference Call line um or we would just call each other and then we also had a physical water cooler for team building catching up shows Etc um we had a lot of challenges accessing our files via VPN when we were working remotely we wouldn't work remotely very often

but when we did accessing our files via VPN caused a lot of problems and we actually explored other solutions that were not Microsoft to do file sharing but one of the benefits of working with Community I.T and you know having a dedicated I.T professional was that they were able to tell us like hey you're actually already paying for this this is part of your Microsoft license and so we dropped everything else and we decided to make the transition from the VPN and this other source to SharePoint

right at February of 2020 which was very serendipitous you know all of this happened and then the pandemic happened and we had to push even further so the transition into SharePoint really allowed us to be able to explore additional services that Microsoft offers so um one of the actually the main reason we chose teams was because it it does work so collaborative so cohesive with SharePoint we save everything on SharePoint SharePoint or OneDrive we don't have any more physical files everything

lives online and the fact that we're are able to access everything so easily through teams and any other Microsoft tools like word or Excel or anything else like forms that Microsoft has has been really really useful for us as Ali mentioned it really has helped us with our hybrid um work structure so then we're able to move our work as we need to one of the changes that we did make is that with a regular license we don't have in calling numbers so maybe that's a challenge that some of you are fa

cing that people don't want to use teams or called is you have to pay a little bit extra to get a dial in number so I highlight it here um as we were transitioning in early in the pandemic people were still figuring out how does Teamworks WebEx Zoom all of the other options so having a dial-in number made it easy for those people to access it and since then we've kept it because we work with um I think a lot of community members that may don't have access to the internet who may have never used

the internet themselves so you know this creates a more inclusive environment where people have various different options to join a team meeting um but another reason that we really like using teams is because it helped us stay connected and have this virtual water cooler we're able to have like share memes and pictures of kids Etc um so it's really important for our culture and values that our team members feel like we're accessible to everyone you know any entry-level team member can reach to

a more executive level team member with a quick chat you know there's additional options sometimes when you go to a leadership's office it feels like you're going to the principal's office so you try to avoid it or you know asking questions you're like oh my gosh I should have I should know the answer to that but teams chats Creeds um that ability to be able to communicate a lot easier without having to write an email or a phone call every single time we can go to the next slide um so one of the

benefits that we really really like um teams for is because it reduces the email content there's a saying that we have in the office which is it's a meeting that could have been an email that could have been a chat message so trying to reduce those and trying to um again get clarifications about a project deadlines you know who do you want to include in an email it just makes us a lot ease of communication um you can set your messages as important or urgent if you need someone to answer you you

know quicker um sometimes you just need the green light of something that person sent it on a meeting or somewhere else so that makes it a lot easier you can also tag the person if you are in a group chat so let's say that you have six other people and you need you know Jane to answer you can add that person and make sure that that person is able to get an additional notification that they need to respond to your comments um you know as we keep saying it really is a collaboration tool and it he

lps us keep continuous records of meetings um or work that we're doing so you know we can have three different chats with six different people going on at the same time but our thoughts are being organized because you know all of the content for one particular topic is is kept in that in that chat together um one of the challenges that we've noticed is that there's an overwhelming source of notifications and again that might be another reason why people are not using teams or resisting so a good

way of trying to avoid that is to help set guidelines and boundaries for your team to turn off the work and for you to commit as well um on on what you have said so for example if you know your little bubble is red just make sure that you are telling your team members don't message me unless it's urgent but you shouldn't do that as well because otherwise they're going to think that everything is urgent so make sure that whatever boundaries that you set you follow them as well um as Carolyn ment

ioned you can set snooze hours do not disturb you know after six o'clock on the weekends and again try to reduce those notifications because sometimes it can get very overwhelming and that's why people just completely turn it off and don't want to even address it because it's just too much um so again another challenge is getting everyone to use the platform that's something that we hear all the time and many of you have commented so try to coach your team on the appropriate use of teams um so y

ou know first I want to make sure that you are checking with your leadership and your HR team um you know set the boundaries on like hey if you have an HR request or you know requesting time off don't do that on on teams unless you're HR approves it because you know hey I asked for that day off and you saw it but you know what's going on here try to avoid all of that so setting those um standards and guidance is really important at the beginning um but another really good way of implementing tea

ms is start small you don't have to make all of the changes all at once because that's usually where you get more of a resistance if you start small with a small task small project people are able to Dabble get a little bit more used to it and see the value that they're adding that teams is adding to their work and are more likely to have a buy-in so um another good practice is to tie your success metrics to it so if you want to go to the next slide um I'll talk a little bit more about a specifi

c case so as Ali mentioned we are moving offices so um one of our success metrics is that we as a team that is um in charge of moving our office is are you using this to-do list are you communicating in the chat are you you know following through and if you're not then you know we want to make sure that we're correcting that action but it's a little bit more digestible when this is the only project that they have to follow it and everything else they might be able to continue to do whatever work

s best for them so this to-do list that Ali put together is really really useful um it's basically for all of us to access and to edit the app is so friendly when we're you know moving from the office home or whatever else we might be working uh we can access and view the charts schedules assign um track progress all on our phones but we can also of course do it on the desktop as well um one of the greatest things about this is that you don't have to have meetings for every single time you want

to update you can just log in you know again tag someone um you know just kind of follow the the uh conversation and a particular topic on a bucket um so then it reduces the amount of time that you have to be you know meeting with each team member uh another tip that we have is that don't feel like you need to create this at the beginning of your project we started meeting about our office move and collecting information and data and you know all of the material and once we started having the ne

ed to be more organized everyone was like yes this is a great answer because we can see everything together so again sometimes the need may need to come before the idea because then more people will start seeing the benefits and the value that it's adding to your project and your organization um and they're more likely to share that success in other parts of their work wow we had a quick question that came in on the chat which is um the slide that you're sharing now is that an app within teams o

r can you talk a little bit about that's just in teams right um yes so Ally do you want to take that one yeah so um this is a list that I created so I was like in the team's app but it did prompt me um which program I wanted to use to create this so it's also Microsoft planner which is part of the Microsoft Office Suite so I didn't have to go to the planner app to do this but I chose planner as like the way that I was creating this to-do list and then it's using the formatting that um planner co

mes with to do the different buckets and then items in each bucket but it it lives in teams so I can open up my teams and go to our strategic plan Channel like the the team Channel and then one of the files at the top of the bar there one of the tabs is this list and it's the office move to do list and then it has everything structured the way planner structures things um so some other uses that we've had with teams is capacity building um it's a lot easier for uh some of our team members to aga

in use teams when they start seeing what other options they have they'll start using it more for their meetings or for their projects one really good option that has started um it was this Supply request because it's so intuitive people always have the same information they usually would email it or fill in Excel sheet but we created a supply request directly on teams and everyone just knows that's where they go and where they use it so again just creating more processes on teams and putting it

in as a first option for your organization then more people are going to think that's the first thing I should start with so we used it to improve processes that includes our onboarding and off-boarding process so when a new team member starts the for things that they see is oh we're using teams you know they're already in a transition phase so they're more likely to adapt to it another tip is to collect employee feedback through a form which can also be distributed to teams as I mentioned we us

e it a lot to remove barriers in communication we want to make sure that our team feels like they can have this virtual open door policy so when we create more forms and we can do this from you know hey what kind of color would you prefer for our new office walls to employee feedback satisfaction then again they're starting to get used to the continuous use and repetitiveness of teams um and then we also like discover a lot of things just by playing around with teams we encourage a lot of our te

am members there's a little um icon that I put here on the bottom on your chat um there's an option for like sending praise like you did a great job there's an option for like requesting like a more official check-in on a project um you can link your Adobe sign and have document signed through it and saved in your Adobe so there's a lot of different options that maybe not all of them work for you but if you play around there might be one that you're like oh actually this is a great option for me

at this moment um so so these are some of the other features that we're currently using teams for um one of the things that we continue to ask is how can we build capacity how can we reduce costs so teams is really a tool that you can use every day that has the ability to increase capacity and plan for the future so probably the one thing that we use teams the most other than chats and uh meetings is this screen sharing feature which when we discovered it was a game changer so if you go to your

chat on the top right corner there I highlight in under the red so when we are meeting in person instead of having to pull up our TV or screen or anything we can just share the screen also without joining a meeting and we really wish we would have known this before we spent all this money buying big TV so we can share screens because it turns out that we can just do it on our own computers without um you know joining a meeting so if you are trying to reduce costs you don't have the space for a

TV you you know also are very mobile maybe in a coffee shop and you want to share screens and you don't want to sit super close next to each other um this is a really good feature that uh that we use a lot the team's voice line so we use our phones completely on teams and this was really helpful we used to use Comcast but the app was not user friendly whatsoever the space you know the the hardware we just never used it we weren't in the office we could use the extra space in you know reducing th

e the hoteling when people were sharing spaces um but also there was a cost with renting the equipment this was just so much easier um the again the app is super Esa friendly we can reassign phone numbers when a team member leaves uh and the best thing is we have the do not disturb time again reducing those notifications has been really helpful for our team to have more valuable work-life balance um so they have a stronger buying into teams and the last thing I wanted to say was you know really

try and try again with teams we have tried several things at different times with different projects and they don't always work out but that doesn't mean that they might not work in the future so you know just because they didn't work for you in the past or in the particular project doesn't mean that it can't work for you or other team members in the future so keep exploring and hopefully you can find a use for teams in the near future thank you so much this is a great run now we got a bunch of

questions coming in about phones and your experience um so I know we've saved some time to get to this one I'm glad that we're we're getting along now so I wanted to go back over our learning objectives um that we wanted to learn about teams and what it can do I think we can check that off I mean we've scratched the surface I think in some ways but um it's just definitely such a a valuable useful tool so we gave you a little bit of of some of what it can do learning tips on how to use teams bett

er Beyond chat um which is kind of the Gateway you know it's like you you open up teams your first time and you're like oh I can you know chat to this colleague or you know ask my supervisor something and then as I think that's a good advice you know for complicated Tools in general is to start small and then keep adding on and as you said just said Elisa to keep experimenting and seeing what's um what's available available and like sometimes I'm like you know what does this button do like what

happens if I do that um and different things that you can attach to it and I love your idea of trying things in the second or third time I know I tried to use the Whiteboard Microsoft whiteboard about a year ago and I was like and then I had a colleague using it just a couple months ago and I was like wow this is a lot better than I remember it they had changed some of the features and made it more more user friendly so I definitely love that tip um and then I thought you did a great job of goin

g over how to select a teams type tool and why some of these features made it really attractive to your organization and maybe to some other other organizations that are out there that are thinking about using it on this webinar maybe have started using it and might want to invest like in the phone the the additional cost for to have the phones um so I think that that was great um okay so I wanted to make sure to thank you and we have some time for questions and I know we have Courtney on as wel

l um she's answering some of the questions of the more technical things on the background but someone had a question for housing Alexandria did you have a teams consultant helping you explore these different features and and kind of maximize your Effectiveness using it or did you figure it out yourself um we used a lot of YouTube that was our consultant we played around a lot and you know we just Googled a lot of things and watched a lot of YouTube videos um I actually think that Microsoft has r

eally good um examples and tools that they help us with but YouTube is has been our best friend when trying to figure things out yeah I love that it's like a you know do it some a lot of nonprofits have that do it yourself um attitude and then trying to find time to prioritize and make enough time to spend on the project to to get it really working at your organization clearly this is giving you benefits that make it worth the time that you have spent figuring out how to use it the best way and

tailoring it to the way that your organization uses it so um that's really helpful um there's a question can you include attendees in teams meetings if they don't have Microsoft 365 yes you can definitely include attendees the only challenge there is that they might not be able to access the information afterwards so like the chat history if they don't have teams they wouldn't be able to access it afterwards but they can definitely join and participate once they're in the call yep that makes sen

se I mean you can add people like with a Gmail account or um you know other email accounts it just someone had asked that as well as like how do you use teams outside of your organization it's super easy you just invite them to a meeting um and uh then you go from there they they get an invite and they click on it and there you are yeah um so we had a question of have you been able to save the cost of Zoom licenses by using teams instead so or you were talking about your previous phone um what y

ou were using for your phones did you see any savings or is it convenience or or how did that work um so for as far as Zoom licenses we still have one when we need to have like large webinars we do a lot of work with the community so sometimes when we need to have like 300 people in a you know in a call we'll just do Zoom um but we only need to have you know one Zoom license instead of one for every single team member uh and then with the phones we really saw the value of our dollar being used t

here because even though Comcast was maybe a little bit less expensive our team members were so frustrated with that that they just were using their personal phone numbers so sometimes you know the value is you know are people using it and are they getting the benefit you know and again an added value to their work um so it's that's how we um recognize that but with the zoom and you know WebEx and any of those other ones we can use the free version if we needed to but everyone pretty much Jesus

teams um we have another question about the voice Services the calls do you have you found it reliable like does it drop calls is it some voice over IP Services have you know difficulties so um have you had any problems with it I haven't um Ali I know you use it more because Ali screens all of our phone calls so have you had any different experiences no I haven't had any issues um with dropped calls or weird um service or anything like that um I have noticed uh like sometimes when a call comes i

n it rings on my phone because I have the teams app and on my laptop and sometimes those are out of sync with each other which is sort of funny so I'll answer it on my phone and it's like still ringing on my laptop but the person on the phone can hear me and it just you know the laptop catches up um and um it always asks that like at the end like how was your service and it's always fine yeah I think I've heard that as well I mean there it's comparable to other other services and then it just ha

s this extra feature of being really convenient if you're already using teams um so we have another question about the phones does the phone system allow for a main line that will separate out like a normal phone system and does it cost you another license um they're also trying to go from Comcast to zoom but um they may also be doing Microsoft 365 so just a quick question about I think it's pretty sophisticated about being able to handle um you know like the things that having a main line and t

hen having a directory and having maybe follow-on calls like it can ring through to your cell phone it can ring through to a different phone it can do a lot of different things like that so you want to talk about that yeah so it definitely can have a main line if you want it really just depends on your preference so Ali is the one that screams all of our calls um but we didn't want her to be her the mainline be her phone number so she has an additional license so that was our choice you don't ha

ve to do it you can have like if you have a receptionist the main line is their phone number um teams actually also sells phones we don't have physical phones on any of them but if you wanted to do like the receptionist you can also have a physical phone in your office otherwise just your computer or your cell phone works um and yeah so when you dial our phone number you get an attendant you can you know click the extension or select option one for Elisa or you know it has all of those same feat

ures that um are traditional and I know in Comcast if that's what you're using it has all of the exact same features it even sends us an email with a transcript of voicemails and it's really helpful um that's great thank you so there's been a bunch of questions um there's another question that came in um did you do formal teams training um versus Hands-On learning on your own training I know you talked a little bit about some tips to get everyone on your team using teams but maybe could you talk

a little bit more about specifically did you do like sit-down trainings with people do you have trainings when you onboard new staff like how does that work I'm going to defer that one to Ali because she's taking over all of our orientation and training and I know she has some plans there yeah um it's sort of a combination um we definitely so we have sort of a sit-down training to go over SharePoint OneDrive like kind of all the software that we use um to explain like logistically how they work

and also culturally how we use them and then there's also um you know when someone is new there's sort of that informal um level of training too where the last person that we have join us um in his like first couple days he was like when am I supposed to team someone when am I supposed to email them and I was like if it's something you would like knock on their door and like say it to them really quickly then that's a team's chat if it's something that you would need a to have a more formal con

versation on that's an email so you know you kind of ease into it also just checking in with people but we do include it in our new employee onboarding along with the other software stuff that's great thank you um I think we've got time maybe for one more question um and there's actually I'm going to combine a couple of different questions and some stuff that you've talked about already but um a lot of questions around this getting everyone to use it um so one is how do you keep the less techie

people in your organization motivated to learn and use teams and how do I wean staff from Zoom because we don't have to pay extra for teams so I think both of those are kind of questions about how how do you get people um together using teams and I know you've talked a little bit about it before but do you have any kind of last words of wisdoms of tips you can try Fiona star alley and then I can follow up sure yeah um yeah I would say as we've said it's kind of the small build up getting people

comfortable with it um a specific example of that that I found when I started with housing Alexandria and I was new to teams is the informal like calls we have sort of an informal policy of we don't have our cameras on if you're doing an internal meeting you know if it's like Wednesday I'm working from home and I'm just like Alisa can I get on the phone with you really quick and ask you about this thing um we're both it's like normal that it's expected we're both cameras off that whole time and

I have found that that mitigates the fatigue from being on um like online meetings so much so I think that's um a pretty big incentive for transitioning people if you can do it in that like maybe your big team meetings are still Zoom are still like big long meetings are more formal in Zoom but um if you get people kind of comfortable with the informal stuff I think that um it can be shorter meetings it can be cameras off and those things will make them enjoy being on teams and then be more um fa

miliar with the whole platform and then you can transition like more and more stuff into teams and I would also say um kind of what we were talking about with the office move where we have that to-do list that's something that we introduced like in the middle of that project so finding places where someone wants more organization and then introducing team there's a new tool there I think can like get the ball rolling on that kind of thing um and I think it's it's just keep it small over time and

then Elisa has some good ideas on this also yeah I think just to um add to that is making teams like the first option so we added the add-in to all of our Outlook email uh and when you schedule a meeting and you just you click add invite it automatically makes it a teams meeting so it's just like a second nature to us like we just yes teams meeting immediately we have to take extra steps to make it assume or any other type of meeting so that's been really helpful is putting teams as the first o

ption and people tend to default to the first option and then make changes somewhere else but um I think everything that Ali said you know I will just Echo um starting small and you know making it a little bit more comfortable for people to be in the space and more people are going to choose it um but the last thing is sometimes it's accessibility issues I would recommend maybe talking to your team member members why are they like is is there an additional reason um you saw all my images are all

in dark mode it just helps with my vision a lot better maybe people don't know how to do that again maybe the notification so maybe it's not necessarily teams that they have a challenge with is something else there so you know asking your team members maybe creating a forms via teams and sending it out to collect some of that data um there might be additional reasons that you know maybe we haven't even thought about and just someone has challenges with it so definitely keep the conversation ope

n with your team and see what they have to say that makes sense and I think um another probably big piece of it is that you're in a you know leadership position and you're on teams so it's like that's where people are gonna find you so when you have leadership who are championing and using it like really using it then um I think that also helps other people come along if that's where they can chat with you and just get a quick question answered for sure thank you so much thank you Elisa and Ales

sandra and Courtney for joining us thank you so much housing Alexandria for sharing these tips with us and spending as much time as I know you did on the slides in this presentation really appreciate it and I think it was just so helpful for all of the people on the webinar today to see how other non-profit practitioners are using this tool so I really thank you so much thanks again thank you thank you thanks Courtney thank you everyone