Community IT Innovators Nonprofit Technology Topics

Nonprofit IT Roundtable pt 2 with Senior Staff

• Community IT Innovators • Season 7 • Episode 9

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0:00 | 27:50

Panel Discussion with Matt Eshleman, Steve Longenecker, Jennifer Huftalen, and Carolyn Woodard

Our experts answered your questions about where nonprofit tech is going next.

In part 1, Community IT senior staff discuss nonprofits and AI, and updated cybersecurity trends to be aware of. In part 2, they discuss updates to Microsoft and Google Workspace, and take audience Q&A. 

AI, Cybersecurity, Google Workspace v Microsoft Office, Gemini v Copilot or ChatGPT or another generative AI tool, AI agents, AI FOMO, data data data, safety and security of your staff, budgeting for and maintaining basic IT, not to mention fancy IT … anything else you want to know about?

We don’t have a crystal ball but we do know our way around nonprofit IT.
We’ll look back at the trends of 2025 and what we got right last January, and we’ll look ahead to make predictions for 2026.

The nonprofit tech roundtable is always one of our most popular webinars every year. As with all our webinars, this presentation is appropriate for an audience of varied IT experience. Community IT is proudly vendor-agnostic, and our webinars cover a range of topics and discussions. Webinars are never a sales pitch, always a way to share our knowledge with our community.

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Thanks for listening. 


SPEAKER_00

Thank you for joining this Community IT podcast, part two. You can find part one in your podcast feed if you subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

Carolyn Woodard

Welcome everyone to the Community IT Innovators webinar, the Nonprofit Tech Roundtable. It's one of our most popular webinars every year. We have a panel of our senior staff here today to talk about essential trends in nonprofit tech and what that means for nonprofits. My name is Carolyn Woodard. I'm the outreach director for Community IT.

Steve Longenecker

My name is Matthew Eshelman, and I'm the Chief Technology Officer. I'm Steve Longenecker. I'm the director of IT Consulting at Community IT.

Jennifer Huftalen

So I'm Jennifer or Jenny Huftalon. I'm the director of client services at Community IT.

Carolyn Woodard

I wanted to do another poll. So how are you feeling about your nonprofit on a scale of one to five? With one being everything is on fire all the time, like the little dog. This is fine. And five being my nonprofit seems to be handling this era pretty well. And this is completely anonymous. We won't be able to see how you really feel about your nonprofit. But we know that there's a range, right? There are nonprofits that are really struggling with this, and nonprofits that are taking this moment to try to readdress their fundamentals. And IT fundamentals are one of those things that you can put some effort into. We want to make sure everyone's taking care of your mental health, make sure you're de-stressing. So go ahead and get in. How are you feeling about your nonprofit? And we'll see what we can do to help you feel that you're not alone in all of this. So I'm going to end the poll. And Jenny, can you see that? Yep, I sure can. How does this track with you?

Jennifer Huftalen

And it's looking um like we got uh one one person who's um you know feels like things are things are on fire. So um thank you for being honest about that and you're in the right place. So um you're doing something today, which is which is great. Um gave it a gave it a two. Um most people in the middle here, 41% um are uh a three. And then um 29% are four, which is great, I'd say. Um 17% gave themselves a five, which means everything's you know, we're handling this change pretty well. So that's a great distribution. I mean, I think that's um about again what we hear when we um you know get uh prospective clients calling us is um you know, we're doing a few things we we don't know what we don't know though, and so we um you know we feel like we need the sort of extra guidance to kind of move continue to move forward. So um I think again the the the good news there is that um you know just starting, like again, being on a webinar like this, um a little bit can go a long way. And I think sometimes we uh get paralyzed when we're afraid uh of the topic. It's a very big topic. And cybersecurity, you know, um it's it feels overwhelming. And if you are somebody who's an expert in nonprofit operations, not an expert in non-screen, you know, we uh wouldn't expect that you'd know kind of the answer to all of these things. But um, just getting started, I think, is is in asking these questions um and understanding some of the fundamentals uh of the organization, taking a look to see where MFA may be um installed already on on um the critical platforms. Uh just some small steps can really um you know go a long way into to protecting your systems. So um, but yeah, this good distribution there.

Carolyn Woodard

No, it looks great. Um, and thank you for helping us reassure everyone. And yeah, someone said in the chat um a year ago I would have answered this very differently. So, you know, we're all here, we're doing our things. And I think one of the things community IT talks a lot about is just the fundamentals don't really change. Um, so your externals may change a lot, but if you can focus on those fundamentals, it goes a really long way to preventing lots of different attacks and insecurities and um changes and prepare you for changes. So I want to take a little bit of a right turn here. We're gonna go um talk with Steve a little bit about more in detail about some of the tools that we're using. Um, Microsoft 365, and Steve, you have some thoughts on where is Microsoft investing.

Steve Longenecker

Yeah, and this is interesting because I asked Copilot um where is Microsoft investing? I actually, you can see the prompt down there at the bottom. I said, you know, I directed Copilot to the Microsoft 365 roadmap and just said, hey, look at the roadmap, look at just very rough because they might, and in fact, it's very interesting. They gave me this graph, but then I used the word they, I don't know. Copilot gave me this graph, and then copilot said, but you know, we're just evaluating the number of roadmap entries. Some products might get, you know, four entries for like a minor improvement, whereas another entry represents a whole lot of investment. So you can't necessarily judge it by that. And I was like, it's kind of a sophisticated, nuanced point to the question I asked. But obviously, Copot is getting a lot of investment from Microsoft and Teams is not that far behind. I would not have expected this myself, although once I thought about it, it made sense to me that Microsoft Purview, which is Microsoft's like platform for um governance and um like data retention and data uh loss protection. And I mean it's a it's a big thing, and maybe I'm maybe I'm mischaracterizing uh it exactly. Um happy to have Matt uh chime in on that. But it's it's definitely an area, you know, with AI being able to like find you know data any anywhere it is, um uh that um organizations are are wanting more of, and Microsoft's responding to that. The next slide. Um one thing I wanted to flag, uh uh a change about um that about Microsoft 365 that I wanted to flag in this annual webinar on changes in the IT you know world and the year looking the year back and looking the year ahead is it is notable that Microsoft 365, Microsoft is asking nonprofits to pay more for their services than they used to. It is still incredibly generous. I do think sometimes um we can lose sight of that if we get grumpy about Microsoft taking away something from us that we've come to rely upon. The most important, I think, thing, especially for the smaller nonprofits, is that uh in July of last year, the Microsoft stopped providing the the 10 free Microsoft 365 business premium licenses. Now that the that termination didn't happen on July 1st for all nonprofits, it started on July 1st, and basically sometime in the next 12 months, each individual organization's anniversary date for that for that subscription was going to occur. And when it occurred, Microsoft would not renew it. And at that point, the my the organization would have to buy the discounted Microsoft 365 business premium licenses, which are still, you know, only seven, I think$72,$36 a year, um, which is totally like close to free compared to what you know enterprises um or or regular commercial uh businesses pay for them. Um so we're still seeing clients who are getting these notes, and we're doing our best to keep on top of it because if you don't notice and the subscription doesn't renew, it is possible that you know staff that have these licenses assigned to them will suddenly not have email services. Um if that happened, you would just like figure out, oh no, it's because these licenses expired. You'd go in and pay, buy, buy new ones at the discounted price, assign them back to the people that that lost their licenses, and everything would sort of resume. I mean, as long as you did it within 30 days, um, no harm done, uh, except for the fact that there would be a service interruption for the actual user. So we're paying, we've been paying attention to that. Um, you now have to pay, you can still pay monthly instead of annually. Um, it's consider you should be expecting to have an annual commitment, but you don't have to pay annually. Um at the nonprofit discounts, we we encourage our clients at this point to just pay annually. Um, it actually causes less credit card, you know, uh reconciliation requirements. You just do it once a year. Um, but if you do pay monthly, now Microsoft charges you for that. I won't list read everything else um that's here, but um yeah, it's a it's a it's a trend. It's getting a little bit more expensive to be a Microsoft customer as a nonprofit.

Carolyn Woodard

I will share the slides um on the website. So if you're you know you're gonna want to look at this later, um, don't worry. I'll I will put them up there. But um some roadmap.

Steve Longenecker

Yeah, and then I was just as I was going through the roadmap, I didn't let Copilot do all the work. I I was sort of rummaging through it, and you know, it's something that I try to look at from time to time anyway. Um, I I do think it's really interesting. This and these links, uh, I think Carolyn, you were thinking about you were gonna chat them. So the identity work that's happening, you know, it's getting identity is getting more and more foundational, and yet at the end of the day, it's like one of those uh like what is it, like to stack of turtles and it's turtles all the way down. Like at the end of the day, how do you prove who you are really in a cyber world, you know? And um, so there is there are efforts being made to like perhaps interface with you know government entities as like the source of truth, um, or for uh corporations to have some sort of structure for themselves. But like it really is in some ways hard to prove who you are. Um like how do if if you lose your your little key fob that that Matt mentioned and you don't have it, like how what do you do? Like, how do you, you know, if you're a small nonprofit, you go into the office or you call someone on the phone and you convince the person who issues the key fobs to send you a new one. But if you're a larger enterprise is a challenge. Um I won't mention the other things here, but click on the links if you want to, but in the interest of time. I guess the the summation is that Microsoft is continuing to invest in their product. The summer the my summary of Google is that Google is as well, but they are really focused, in my opinion. This is more based on um um an intuitive feeling than me getting a uh looking at the roadmap and getting data. But I really think Google is focused on on AI and on and on Gemini, which is their AI product. It is a state-of-the-art model. If you are a Google customer um and you're already quote unquote paying for AI, you should probably and you want to use AI, you should probably at least start start in Gemini because it's great, it's a great model, um, and you um probably will get a lot of learning um out of it and you know, build your community's AI skills in a fairly you know safe place in the sense that um you know Google will not be selling your your data out uh when you're in the Google workspace world. If you're using Gemini as a consumer uh with a personal account, uh all bets are off. But if you're using Gemini in Google Workspace, I think you can trust that um, you know, that it's it's sort of got some guardrails on it. Um I would say otherwise, probably Google's investment in their workspace platform has slowed down a little bit. Um there are still some interesting things worth highlighting here. Um they've been putting a lot of energy into increasing their native tools for migrating into Google, which makes sense. If you want to have good business, one way is to help people find an easy way to get off of other platforms. They added a Dropbox to Google Drive. Um, it's in beta right now, but they added that uh recently. So I would say, you know, if you are paying for Dropbox and you're a Google customer, um you know, there's more tools now, tools that are free if you're a Google customer to get your files out of Dropbox and into Google, and that's exciting. Um, and perhaps you could save on a on a Dropbox bill every year. Um, because Google has a lot of storage included in their workspace um platform. Uh and then I wanted to highlight the fact that they're that they spent one of the highlights of 2025 from my perspective, because I use the Microsoft, it's called bookings, but it's like it's just becoming more and more common, right? Where if you want to have a meeting with someone, they send you a link and you click on the link and then you can book time with them. And it's like the calendar is, you know, you don't see much, but you see enough to book to find a free time on their on their calendar. So Google has updated that and and changed that around. So if you're a Google Calendar user uh and you don't know about this, you might want to use it, depending on kind of like what you're doing all day. But if you're ever having trying to find time with people with another person, um this could be a great a great tool for you to use. Um there's other stuff there. The ransomware um uh detail is uh not nothing, that's for sure. So I appreciate that their addition um to that.

Carolyn Woodard

Thank you, Steve. As I said at the beginning, there's just so much. So it's very hard to find uh a few things to highlight, but um I want to reassure everyone who's asking great questions. Um we're gonna I have access to the chat and to the QA. So I will add that into the transcript uh if there were questions there that we either answered over on Reddit or weren't able to get to here, but we'll get an answer from our experts and put that up on the website as well with the transcript from this webinar. So look back for that. Um all right, so we have QA. There's a couple of questions um that have come in, and I really like this one. We don't have a ton of time for QA, but um Rich asked, what are some examples of how nonprofits use paid versions of Copilot and Gemini? Um so I wanted to put that out there. I personally have been using Gemini a lot through our Google Workspace um official enterprise account, especially I love the gems, so you can um kind of help it understand a persona you want Gemini to take on. And then you don't have to re-ask it that prompt every time, telling it, you know, we're a nonprofit IT company and we have this kind of audience. It'll just um work on what you've already put in and continue to help you with content so you don't have to keep reprompting it. Um but anyone want to weigh in on something you've seen um nonprofits using the paid version of Copilot or Gemini.

Steve Longenecker

Well, it's really good at you know summarizing documents, writing, writing things that um, you know, you uh generally you'll want to edit afterwards, but it is it is pretty good. I mean, Jenny, we were drafting something for the uh to send out to all clients about some change to some security. I don't know what it was anymore, but I wrote I wrote it up and it was pretty good. I mean, I thought it was pretty good, and I generally write stuff myself, and I sent it to uh the senior leadership, and uh Jenny sent it back in about you know an hour. Like, well, here's how I would change it. And it was like, oh, this is a lot better. I was like, Jenny, good job. And he's like, well, co-pilot. I was like, okay, all right. So, you know, it's that kind of thing, it's just like polishing or drafting and getting started. Um, it goes a long way. I think also, um, I think copilot sort of has a reputation for being lousy at generating slide decks. Um, but um other tools, I mean Gemini I think would be good for for generating, uh, Claude apparently is good at just slide decks. But if you can give it like, you know, a bunch of information, whether it's a Word document or some other document, a PDF, and say, I need to make a 20 slide slide deck out of this. Um again, you're probably gonna do a lot of editing afterwards, but it's it'll probably be a lot more efficient to do that than to do it from scratch yourself.

Carolyn Woodard

I've also heard of people using it um kind of to question themselves. Like you can ask it to do like Socratic questioning. Um, so it'll ask you questions back about the document that you are trying to write. Like, well, what is your goal or what is your um purpose? And that can be really helpful if you use it as like a thought partner to try and get um going on what you want to accomplish. I think there's lots of some um automations that uh I haven't experimented with myself, but we probably have nonprofits, and we'll be able to do a future webinar about some of those tools. Anyone else have some something to add in?

Jennifer Huftalen

Yeah, I would just echo a little bit of what Steve said, and I would um you know mention that I do think it's very good for taking messaging and kind of breaking it down, and and um I think it's uh also better the more you say what you want from it. So if your first message back is like it's still a little bit um you know long-winded, um, you can ask it to be a little more concise or um a little friendlier, maybe a lighter touch, and um you know keep working on iterations of it and um see improvements there. Um I have heard this is not from a client, but I've heard of folks not with Copilot or Gemini, but in Claude, which I know a lot of like universities have been using. Um they were kind of um highlighting the cautionary tale of of making sure no it's it's not too obsequious and giving you things that um it thinks it wants you to have. And so I think again, just clarifying what um what you're asking it to do, clarifying that the information is legitimate. Um this friend of mine mentioned that they uh has to put together some references and um it returns um um two of the four um references they sent along were kind of made up. And so when they asked, hey, is this real? Um it was like, oh gosh, you're right, it's it's not. Thank you for saying that. So I think just you know, making sure even these great ones, and I think we've got a one a lot of you know really positive stories about about the tools, but again, just making sure that um a human is verifying the information before it goes out to any of your constituences is important.

Carolyn Woodard

Yeah, and I'll I'll jump in and say that we at Community IT we started a midweek podcast, um kind of a short segment on AI every week on Tuesday. So if you have more questions about AI at nonprofits and more resources, thank you in the chat. People are sharing some resources. I'd love to get those and we'll include them on that podcast. It's uh AI specifically for nonprofits, so use cases, um, questions, news about nonprofits using um different tools. Uh, that's all going to be in there for about 10-15 minutes on Tuesdays. So look for that. If you just subscribe to our podcast, um you'll get it in your feed. Um All right. Well, let's see. Um I don't know if we have time for one more um quick question. Um there was a question in here about um SharePoint structures and avoiding oversharing. Um so I don't know, Steve, if you want to take that on. I feel like we touched on it a little bit earlier of how to organize your files, but maybe actually this is not fair to ask you because it's a whole hour-long webinar.

Steve Longenecker

How do I briefly files? Yeah, the point, the problem that's being surfaced here is like in the past, if you had a uh a library that uh was only you know restricted to just the finance department, great. But if it turns out that there's a subfolder buried deep in that library that some well-meaning member of the finance team had shared with quote unquote an everyone link to another, to a colleague. And to that to that colleague, that colleague at that was supposed to be able to access that subfolder, right? But instead of using a specific person link, they used an everyone link or maybe an everyone at our our organization link, right? Well, it it turns out that now everyone at that organization, if they know that link, they can access that subfolder, even though the library is restricted to the finance team and only the finance team. And it turns out that copilot would be really good at finding the files in that folder because it would think to its think. I mean, I'm giving a lot of credit here, but from the co pilot's algorithms, everyone at the organization has access to that subfolder. It has been deemed so, it has been shared appropriately. Therefore, it is fair game. If I want to surface, if I'm a question that has a relevant document in that subfolder, I will bring it to the to as part of the answer. Um Snuffing those things out is hard. I mean, one thing that I think we are talking to clients about now is changing practices. Don't use the everyone link except when you really mean it. Don't use the everyone at this organization link and change the default for that now. Because those links obscurity was fine in the old day, but now it's not anymore. How to the new habits are great. The old habits have already done the damage that they've done. So there are tools you can use. And you can painstakingly like just get the list and look at them and say, okay, these are the, you know, these are the problem areas. And it probably is mostly, you know, you probably know where you're concerned. You're concerned about the finance share or finance library. You're concerned about the HR library. You know, you're concerned about the leadership library. You may not be as concerned about the program library unless the programs do, I mean, some programs do have a lot of sensitivity to them, and that's understandable. Um, but you know where you know where the problem spots might be. And it probably is worth before you make that stuff fair game for co-pilot or or the same, all of this is true for on the Google side with Gemini. Um, you need you do want to um examine those uh situations. And there's probably no short way to do it.

Carolyn Woodard

Um I don't know. I don't think we have time for one more question. I'm sorry. Um, so we are gonna go over on Reddit. It's uh Reddit r/slash nonprofit IT management after this, and we have a couple more questions we could answer over there. Um in the interest of time and to um end on time, I'm gonna go over our learning objectives. So I think we, as I said, we just scraped the very top surface of these big um buckets, but we thank you for coming along with us. And if any of these things are you know interesting to you, like please follow up with us. Uh so we wanted to cover what do you need to know about AI. As I said, we have a new podcast. We will be having some more webinars uh this spring about nonprofits and AI. It is what everyone is really interested in right now. So uh please join us again for that. Uh we wanted to learn about new cybersecurity attacks and prevention. Thank you, Matt, for catching us up on that. And again, uh February 25th will be AI and cybersecurity, and April, our webinar will be all about the instant cybersecurity incident response uh report. Um, we wanted to learn about new Google Workspace and Office 365 updates. Thank you, Steve, for catching us up on that. There's so much happening. So, and even some things that are non-AI, so that's very interesting. And uh, we'll be doing more webinars uh throughout the year on those tools as well. And then understand that other nonprofits are experiencing and worrying about a lot of the same things that you're worrying about. Uh, we're not alone. So thank you, Jenny, for joining us and helping us understand that. Thank you, everyone in our um audience. Uh, thanks for joining us on the chat and putting your questions in. Um, as I said, Matt will be next, we'll be back next month for our next webinar on how to use AI tools safely. If you don't know the difference between using a public tool like ChatGPT or logging on to a more private enterprise tool at your organization, like Copilot or Gemini if you use Google Workspace, this webinar is really gonna help clarify that for you. We touched on it today, but we'll go into more depth uh February 25th. We hear a lot about making sure not to share sensitive data outside of your organization. So we're gonna talk about that. That's at 3 p.m. Eastern, Noon Pacific on Wednesday, February 25th. I'm gonna put that um the link to register right in the chat right now. Um, but it's on our website as well, community it.com. Please don't forget as you exit the webinar today to take our short survey. One lucky winner chosen at random will receive a$25 gift certificate for helping us learn more about how we're doing. And join us on Reddit R slash nonprofit IT management for more QA with our experts for about another half an hour. Um, so thank you very much for joining us. Your time is a gift, we appreciate it, and I hope to see you back in a future webinar. Thank you, Jenny, Steve, and Matt, for for joining us and sharing what you know.

SPEAKER_00

Okay, thanks for facilitating, Carolyn.

Carolyn Woodard

Thank you, everyone.

SPEAKER_00

Thank you for joining this Community IT podcast, part two. You can find part one in your podcast feed if you subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.