Improving Board Engagement: Practical Strategies for High-Impact Meetings

Finish my water is a rookie move. >> Hello everybody. I see we have folks starting to join us here. Welcome, welcome. >> We have a fun team actually all here from Michigan here. Excited you all could join us. Um I see the room filling up now. Uh while we wait for folks, if you want to pop in the chat here where you're tuning in from a little bit about your organization, and uh we'll get it kicked off here shortly. Cool. Welcome folks. Welcome. Welcome. We've got the Zack team here with us as well as Ian Bernstein. excited to uh learn how to uh spice up your board engagement. Sweet. Got folks from Washington DC. Welcome, welcome. Sweet. Give everybody about 30 more seconds to see the rooms filling up. Milton, Pennsylvania, welcome. Welcome. Happy you all could join us here. Cool. We got Boston represented. Fantastic. All right, we're at 202. I think we're good to uh go ahead and kick it off here. So, I said, welcome everybody to today's Tech Soup webinar. Um, improving board engagement and practical strategies for high impact meetings. Uh, we have awesome team here assembled. I'm excited to learn from them. But before we get into that, um, first I just want to, uh, welcome you all to the Tech Soup global network. Um, here at Tech Soup, we work to build a dynamic bridge that leverages technology to enable connections and innovative solutions for a more equitable planet. Um, so thank you all for being here. Um, next up, uh, just a quick slide on housekeeping on how to participate and engage. Um, I see a lot of you have already found your way to the chat. Um, so feel free to pop your questions, um, comments in there. We'll be monitoring that, taking questions. Um, also take advantage of the Q&A tab. Um, you know, that would probably be the better place to pop your questions in there. I'll be monitoring both just in case, but um, yeah, we want to hear from you. Don't be shy. Um, and then also you can click the uh CC show captions button on the bottom of your Zoom screen as well if you would like to see the captions. Um, and then a quick note uh this is being recorded and we will be sending out um a recording of the session and any resources available uh following the end of the session. >> Awesome. So, it is my pleasure to introduce uh today's expert speakers. Uh first up, we are joined by the Ze team. Uh so, please welcome co-founder and CEO Robert Wolf. Uh we have Trey Mascola who runs the front of house at Ze and then our moi moderator today uh who is also the head of brand and partnerships Allison Kapali. Uh we are also joined by founder of the Gary Bernstein Clinic, Ian Bernstein, who will share a firsthand perspective on the realities of nonprofit board management and how Zach has changed the way his organization runs meetings. Uh so without further ado, I'll uh stop sharing my screen here and hand it over to Allison. Uh thank you all for joining us. Excited what you uh have here. >> Great. Thanks Andrew. Hi everyone. I'm Allison from Zack along with my team here, Robert and Trey and Ian. Thank you all for being here. I just wanted to say we are trying to reimaginate reimagine everything that comes along with a board meeting and nonprofits especially need, you know, a platform that can help them do that. Um, we want to be a little fun. We don't want to be so boring. So, if you get bored, you can type in the chat a snack that you wish you had right now during this webinar because we all know I wish I had a gummy bear. So, if you want to type anything in there, please feel free and also to use it to ask us any questions. We will answer them as soon as we can. But I wanted to first off intro Wolf. He is our co-founder and CEO and he knows the pain of board meetings more than anyone. We also, Trey, Robert, and I all worked at the last company he started called Crowdrise, which has a special place in our hearts and is dedicated to nonprofits. So, I wanted to kick it off with Robert. if you want to just give a little background about Crowdrise and why we have a special place in our hearts for nonprofits, that'll be great. >> Yeah, thanks Al and everyone at Tech Soup and most importantly Ian, who is definitely going to be the smartest person you've ever heard talk about the giving space. Uh, so we we really we really did build Zack based on our own life experience. So much of that was in the nonprofit space. So Al, Trey, and I all worked at Crowdrise, which was a fundraising platform for years. We were acquired by GoFundMe. Al ended up running marketing for the charity program at GoFundMe. And Trey ran the whole charity side. So we are deeply familiar with the nonprofit space and we had a lot of angst around the board meeting. So in our experience, it took us 100 150 hours as a leadership team to prepare the board presentation. We would send it to our board as a PDF or a slide deck that they couldn't read on their phone, nor could they engage with it in any way. But the very worst part was that we would get into our live board meetings and spend most of the time rereading our board a deck that they had already read. So the the whole process was a waste of time for pretty much everyone involved and and we knew we were bad at it, but it wasn't until after our company was acquired and we sort of got out there in the world that we realized this angst we were feeling was universal. So that that was the catalyst that led us to launch Ze. So, as Al mentioned, we are reimagining governance and what we think of as the archaic, miserable board meeting process. And we do that by saving leadership teams probably 80 85% of their time. You will send a superior presentation to your board. So, there's no chance anyone on this Zoom woke up this morning and read your news in a PowerPoint or a PDF. That's just not the way we consume content anymore. And then then most importantly and you and hopefully you'll see some of this in the demo is the software makes it so that you get ahead of all of what I would describe as homework prior to the board meeting so that your live meeting can be entirely forward thinking and strategic instead of doing what we did which was a lecture. So I'll stop talking. I'm sure I I hope that made sense and we like total chaos. So, please, if you have questions, chime in and we'll answer them in real time as best we can as opposed to waiting for the end. >> Awesome. Perfect. All right, Trey, you're up. We've got Trey. He's head of sales. He's the tallest. Maybe Ian's taller. I don't know. Trey neck and neck. >> And Trey is going to walk us through a demo. Again, same with this. Interrupt. We like interrupting. We We don't care if he's talking. Just answer. ask questions and we will answer them best we can. Um, and take it away, Trey. >> Awesome. >> It does. The questions don't even have to be about Zack. >> Random. >> Yeah, we're good with anything. >> Yeah, the less I'm talking the better for all of you in the audience. So, the keep them coming fast and furious. Um, but I will uh I will walk through kind of how the product works and and hopefully tell a little bit of how we got here. So, what you're looking at now is the finished version of AZ. So, this is what you're actually going to send out to your board of directors for them to review. And and one quick note, like you send this out as a single secure link. The idea being we don't necessarily want these um downloaded PDFs living on our director's desk for the next decade. Like we want to have total control, revoke access as needed, keep it um and just control who can see it and who can't. And we make it really easy to see the content, right? You don't always have to have a username, password, but we can still protect the data. And then more importantly, once the board is here, they can scroll through this in a way that you'd expect to interact with materials in your everyday life. So, as I'm going through, you you'll kind of get the feel here, but it's more like reading the New York Times or Axios or Medium than it is an old school kind of like PDF. Um, and that's all by design, right? Like we're trying to get away from this a little bit. Um, this is from Robert's first company. It's a real board deck that would get sent around and it's just not how people consume anymore, right? We want something that's easy to get in and out of. And especially for our board members in the NPO space, they're almost always volunteers. And so they are busy with either their full-time job or whatever that is that they're choosing to pursue, we want to make sure that if they come access this on mobile or a tablet, it's a really great experience because we get 90% of our traffic through mobile. So regardless of PE where people choose to interact with the app, super easy to get in here, get the information that they need to help be informed for the meeting and kind of go through that material. So uh as I'm going through here, you'll see like a board member could easily do what I'm doing and review the entire thing this way, but it is organized with this navigation as well. So you can jump around section to section, get into whatever piece may make the most sense for them to review and get into. And then putting all this together is really, really simple. So, we don't care necessarily where the content comes from. So, Ze has its own editor, so you can type directly into the platform. Really simple. If you have uh parts of a presentation already built or a maybe there's a contract or a grant to review, you can just drop that in as a PDF or even a slide deck and I can go through that content directly in the platform. And then as I continue to scroll, you'll see a few other ways that you can have some interactive content. So, Ze has some AI tools that will build you these sort of interactive tables and charts. And for us, like this is more what board members and audiences are expecting nowadays is they want something they can click into and and manipulate a little bit again as opposed to maybe these more traditional sort of read only PDFs. We want something a little bit more dynamic so that it kind of keeps our interest. And then again, the AI can help you sort of summarize all the material that you're sending out. So now when we're giving this to our board, the expectation is I can come and get my sort of executive level summary, the key takeaways, the highlights, if I want to dig in, if I want to get a little bit more background, awesome. All of that is still there. I can go through that material uh as deep or as shallow as I want, but you can keep the focus on things that are most relevant, most pressing for the organization so that your your conversation is more focused. Okay, so that's sort of uh like the the structure, the layout. the the next few pieces are going to be more about how do we make these meetings more engaging? How do we make them more productive and and a big part of that is allowing our board to be prepared and come ready. And so uh a few different ways we'll do that, right? We've given them now like this um simpler way to interact and to read and they can see it anywhere. They can also start asking questions directly within the platform. So um you know what are sales oops uh this quarter. So they can act uh ask a really direct question and get a quick answer, right? Where are we at with donation volume? Where's X to Y? And so instead of reading out through that entire PDF, they can quickly get this data, they could say something like summarize the financials for me. And now they can get all of this information in advance. And so they don't have to bug the operating team. They can go through, they can get whatever they think is most critical and try to get an understanding of it. And then even as an operator of the org, you can use this tool to start to prep or or get into the the material a little bit. So maybe before you send it out, you come and ask um what would a really mean board member ask me, right? And you could actually go through and sort of stress test the presentation to find inconsistencies or or make sure that you're kind of buttoned up and then Ze can not only find and locate some questions, but it can answer them or help you prepare the answers as well. So really cool and and powerful stuff uh within here. And the idea is now you know we've consumed this content the board members can ask ask and answer a lot of their own questions so that they're ready to go in in way less time and then they can start interacting with you as the actual operator. And so what we want to do is start this dialogue sort of asynchronously leading up to the meeting. And so instead of these these get gettogethers being like one-way presentations, what we really want is to have that back and forth and questions asked and answered ahead of time. So that good or bad news, you know, we've already created alignment with folks, the meeting is now way more about what's next and strategy and ideas instead of just a review. Like that part can be done ahead of the meeting. And so you can leave your comments here. Um you can make them public for for the group for conversation. You could add a private note. And then you would just depend depending on the question you can either address it immediately and mark it as resolved, right? You don't have to spend time on that in the meeting or you could flag it for conversation. And so now once you're in the room together, you can kind of highlight the most pressing questions or the most strategic ones for discussion with the group as you go through it often. Um, okay. So I'll keep ripping. And then the this one's always a popular feature. You know, everything I'm showing you is is about engagement and keeping the board interested in all of that, but a big part of that is just making sure that we're all aligned on are they prepared? Did they go through the content? So, you do get full analytics on all of your meetings. And essentially what this is showing you, right, is who logged in, did they log in at all, did they review the content, and how much time did they spend there? And so, we love this. Um, you know, I always think of this as like a positive peer pressure thing. Like, we we tell board members about it. we'd like them to know so that they're ready and and have gone through the material and so you get a really good pulse on like the engagement levels and then you can also see what do they care about because if we're sending you know 15 20 pages of information and they're looking at the same 10 or 11 every time that's really good information to have right we can either refine the approach next time or call things up a little bit higher if if nobody's looking at it but the data and making those decisions based on data is really really great for the org and you can continue to sort of refine and round out the the process as you dig in. And you get that in aggregate, but you also get it per board member, too, which is great. All right. And then I'm going to show a little bit too of the back end here and and I'll go relatively quick, but what you're looking at here is like the repository or the homepage um you know, like the portal aspect of this because that is part of of how Zack operates. Everything is stored here for you. So from a governance perspective, we want to ensure that all of your board meetings, all of your board materials, your past board meetings, and even things like, you know, trainings, bylaws, like all of that can live within this one platform. So as we get new board members, um they can come in and see past meetings, past trainings, whatever it is, we can make sure everybody's up to date with any certifications or anything like that. Uh and you're able to use Ze, you know, for for a multitude of things. So certainly your board meetings but committee meetings uh even internal meetings as we go because the permissions will change based on who you are. So the view changes here. If I'm on the board I see board meetings. If I'm not on a finance committee that disappears for me. That folder is not seen. And so you can really control who can see what. You'll store your minutes here, your votes, all of that will live in one spot. Um so for those annual audits, really easy to come in, grab your material, give somebody access to it, uh and show whatever you need to show. And then I'll go uh quick here through a little bit more of the governance piece. So just so you can see some of this on there, but you're actually able to log what we call like a prevote in advance of the meeting. So I can send this out to my board members ahead of time. They can sort of indicate, you know, yay, nay, or whatever it is. If it's unanimous, that's great. In the meeting, I can just confirm that and say, hey, this is approved. And we can quickly move on. We don't have to spend 10 minutes in conversation if we're already on the same page. Um, but you can also have your dialogue, you know, take the oral vote, mark it, yay, nay, and then this will all live on the back end for you. You're also able to assign task. So, if there's a follow up to a vote or somebody wanted to see a different form of information or or make an introduction for you, you can actually put this right into the system, assign it to either a staff member or a board member, and we'll help you follow up with that. And so, the the platform will send out emails to make sure those things are resolved by the next meeting. And so it just helps you keep that momentum and keep that productivity from, you know, where everybody's fired up at the meeting into the next day and weeks to ensure all those things are actually getting followed up on. And then those minutes and and votes that I talked about all get stored back here. So your votes are are digitized and stored. You can add um they're timestamped. You can add notes to it. And it will give you the ability to either upload your own minutes, which is totally fine, or you can use our creator, and this will essentially make like an outline for you. So now I've got an outline. It'll be based on the meeting that was just held. So, it can quickly load in some things for you like, you know, uh, on this date, at this time, these people met, right? We know the viewers, they talked about these topics, they passed these votes, and it will generate all this for you. It's all a text editor, so you can add or or remove content as needed. Um, you can kind of get these to your liking, round them out, but ultimately, you'll then be able to vote on them right within the platform and sign off on them. So again, as you go into your audits at the end of the year or you need to document all of this, everything is stored right here. Super easy, super fast to access. Okay. All right. This is this is it. Homestretch. I'm just going to show like how you actually make uh this, right? This kind of version that I was showing you. So on the back end, it really couldn't be easier. I come into here. You can start from scratch, but we will help you build like a custom template. Um we're pretty good at getting you started there. But you can say, you know, big text is a good start. There's a brand kit automatically applied. So it would be your color scheme, your logo that are already loaded. Uh, and this just allows you to go faster. You don't have to design slides. You don't have to worry about, you know, Robert using Helvetica and I use Times New Roman and then reformatting everything. All of that part is automated. So I can come in, add some text quickly. Super simple. And then from there, you can start to drag and drop materials. So again, if you've already got a PDF or something that's constructed, great, right? I can keep this as a full screen option. I can make it a carousel um so that I could actually flip through it a little bit just depending on your preference. Uh I'm going to add maybe a quick screenshot here. So if you're using a fundraising software that's giving you like an output like this, awesome, easy to drop that in really quick drag and drop or you could load it as a file and then you can open up the menu and and get even deeper with this stuff. And so I won't go through everything, but you can customize some KBI KPI blocks. Uh there's integrations with Google and Microsoft and Carta and video and so let's say we want to add maybe it's a P&L statement or a donation sheet but you just pick the file right so I'm going to connect really quick my account which takes 2 seconds I'll look for whatever spreadsheet it's called and once I grab that it'll bring in all the tabs for me and so now I pick a tab I could do a name varian here too but this will now come in directly from the source so I don't necessarily have to make this another attachment or a screenshot or another file that's being sent. Easy for me to go through, review it, and because it's connected, I can sync this in real time. I can also, it's going to look good on my phone, tablet, it's responsive. I can lock rows and columns. And then you can start utilizing some of the AI tools. And so now, you know, if we're being realistic, again, our our board members or volunteers are on the go. They're probably not going to read every spreadsheet we put in there or every row and every column of it. So, we can use AI to create the key takeaways, right? And give ourselves a chance to give them the most important information. Um, so it's really good at generating this, right? But it's all editable, so you can refine it and and key in on the specifics that you're um trying to showcase. And you can also have this build your visuals for you. So, super fast, super easy. But I find a lot of NPOS will skip this step. either, you know, there's no visuals to help tell that story or somebody's spending an hour, you know, creating a pie chart in here. Hopefully, this will give you the best of both worlds. It takes about 45 seconds and it will make an interactive chart for you. Again, this is going to look good on mobile, tablet, and your laptop. And we've already done the prompt design, so you can click the button to make the chart. If you wanted something that was more like a uh a bar graph or a waterfall or a pie chart or whatever, you just tell it that and then it'll recreate that kind of in in your um preferred version. And you could always like change the colors here. You can ask it to remove categories or whatever it is. But pretty fast, pretty easy to start putting in that material. And the last two things I'll I'll show are as you're building this out, you can either be an admin and see everything, which is really easy, but if you have, you know, maybe there's someone on the programs team and you want them to add a quick update about a project, but you don't necessarily need them seeing financials or an HR issue or whatever, I can give them section access to a single spot. When they log in, they only see that one area. And then they can do what I just did. they can come in here, spend 5 minutes, maybe 10, sort of like dumping in the content that they know the board's going to care about, that they want to use. Um, so maybe that's the PDF or some of the integrations using some of those AI tools. And then they can optimize it. And so now I've kind of dumped in a couple of pieces of material and this will now read through everything. It's going to go through that entire PDF. It's going to read my integrated spreadsheets, any text that I put in there, the images, and give my board a a detailed executive summary so that they can come in and say, "Okay, here's my key takeaways. Here's my highlights, low lightss, initiatives, etc." And really for you all as like the people creating the material, you make this shift from author to editor, and you are able to go in and say, "Okay, this is really great, but you know what? I don't care about that piece right now." And maybe you want to bump one of these cool images or something like that a little bit higher. So I grab this guy and I'm just copying and pasting. But I can move this around. But this is really where we spend our time is refining and making sure the tone and the focus is there so that the meeting can be productive as opposed to building this out from from absolute zero. Um so those are um I think most of the big ones. Um but ready for a million questions or or we can keep ripping but um but that's I think the the highest level of of how Zach works and comes together. >> Um we had a question from Dana just about limiting the AI access to the information. Can you just talk about our AI and Yeah. >> Yeah. Great one. So when you're back over here and I'm looking through Ask Zack, this will only search through things in the platform that I have access to. So if you have um you know a board member who only sees specific meetings or maybe there's somebody on the staff, it is only going to be able to look through materials that they have expressly been given access to uh as opposed to like carbon to see everything. So you'll have total control over not only the information itself of course but what is exposed to different people based on what you want them to see. Yeah, it's a great one. I I think that's part of the Oh, sorry. Go ahead, Robert. >> No, no, go ahead. I was going to say I think part of the big piece here is the security both for the materials itself but also the AI because you know the other side of that is like certainly we want to control what people are seeing but your board members >> probably are already taking this right and putting it into uh an unsecure insecure unsecured version unsecured version of of chat they might be insecure if they don't feel good about their data but uh but of their insecure or unsecured um chat GDP instance or clawed and then all of that data is just out into the world accessible and so we want to have some controls there to make sure uh they don't need to do that that they can search what they're supposed to search right within the platform. >> Um yeah, great. Anyone else have any questions for Trey? I do have a question that Robert I would like you to answer um about board members and just trepidation there on if they're Gen X or just not technologically savvy uh worried that they want a traditional printed out or PDF report. Can you speak to that because we get that question a lot. Yeah, I I it's probably actually better for Ian to answer it, but I'll give my um I'll give my quick answer because it's the number one question we get on demos, and I'll um the way I am going to say it is going to sound horrible, but I'll say it anyway, is um will my 10,000year-old board member be able to review a Zach? And and the answer is yes. And there's no, again, this is repetitive, but there's no chance any of your board members read their news or think about a Kindle, right? Nobody reads in a PDF by choice, right? You're only doing it when it's sent to you. That's just not the way people read anymore. So, I I think that's sort of an anecdotal way to say it, but we don't we don't target nonprofits in our paid marketing at all. Zero. Yet nonprofits make up about 40% of our customer base. All of those are for through referrals and and those are board member referrals. So I think from the standpoint of can board members use Zack, do they like Zack? The the answer is yes because we'll we'll be working with company X and someone on the board likes it and says to the executive director of the nonprofit that they're on the board of, hey, go check this out. So, but Ian, do you want to chime in about that? sort of can board members does your board um can they access it and are they comfortable with it? >> They hate it. They don't like it. Uh you know all cander uh the best example and thank you Robert and team for having me. Uh we love the product, but the best way I like to describe it is uh my mom who's 80 uh usually can't get in the meeting until about the Zoom for about 20 minutes later uh once the meeting starts and keeps calling me while I'm trying I'm the chair of the board and running the meeting. Uh but she can get into Zack with no problem. Right. Ze is incredibly intuitive, easy to use. Um, and I had the uh the same exact uh trepidation to start and uh first meeting was a little clunky because it's just something new and by the second meeting everybody was you know there was no issues. It was that fast. Um, and and one of the things I I will say, I don't like to hang give a lot of compliments, but uh I would say the team over at Zach was great because we put together our first presentation and they very politely uh said, "Hey, how about a little help? We can maybe make this a little better for you, meaning uh your first pass really is no good." And uh and they continually helped us along the way to help make uh the presentation better. And so we've refined it now to what really works for our organization. And it's it's incredibly easy for people to navigate. And I would tell you everything that that Trey uh kind of walked you through, I would have told you there's no way we're using half that stuff. And we pretty much use all of it. Um and it just just easy. It's incredibly easy and intuitive. And could you talk real fast just about your organization because I feel like and this was certainly the case at Crowdrise because we were the platform for Red Cross and UNICEF that smaller organizations thought there's no way we can we can use this yet we were the platform for thousands of smaller nonprofits and Dana asked a question that I think is is relevant um based on your answer. >> Yeah. No, that's great. So um we are a free medical clinic. We've been around for 22 years. My dad was a doctor and was seeing patients um at a homeless shelter and wanted to do this full-time. And so our model is uh while there's plenty of other ways out there to to treat people to provide healthcare, we we do it with no reimbursement from the government, no funding from the government, uh all private donations. We have 700 volunteers, a lot of doctors, dentists, pharmacists, nurses, uh you know, uh whatever um hygienists and so uh we only have nine employees and we had to raise about a million and a half dollars a year and we give away about $15 million of the free healthcare. And so our board uh is kind of disjointed as far as you know, different types of, you know, professions and expertise. And so, um, you know, we, uh, it's a pretty intensive endeavor that we have. And so, our board, a lot of them don't are not medically inclined. They don't have any medical experience. And so, I I I would tell you probably probably similar to many of you on this call right now, our our meetings, and I've been chair of the board now for 12 years. I don't see that going away anytime soon. And we're actually about to grow and open up a clinic with a with the largest hospital in the state of Michigan, largest employer in the state of Michigan in the city of Detroit. And I think we will be uh we might be touching as many as 30 to 40,000 patient visits a year, all for free. Uh and probably with a budget of $2.5 million, which is crazy when you think about it. And it's a whole another story about our healthcare system. But um we used to so what our process was I would have to contact everybody who had some level of of interest what they had to do to kind of put together some information whether they ran a committee or it was a CEO or CFO and I'd gather everything. It would take me two days. I'd put it all in one PDF. Then I go to my office and and make 17 copies of it and it'd be, you know, like this thick. And I put it on the, you know, I'd send it out ahead of time by email and then I print it out and put in front of everybody. It's clear nobody read a damn thing. Like absolutely nobody read anything. And so to me, the biggest one of the biggest advantages is well, number one, I know who's read it, right? So, uh, Robert actually gave me a few tricks. And so now what I do is, you know, a week out from the meeting, I say, "Hey, you know, make sure everyone reads the D, you know, reads the Zack and everyone's read it." And then I I look at who hasn't read it and 4 days out, I send just to the people haven't read it. So I know you still haven't read it. And then two days before the meeting, I sent to the last few people haven't read it. Now, by the time the meeting comes, everybody's read it. Everybody's prevoted. And to me, the the single most fundamental important change that happens with Zach is board engagement. And so I don't know if you could really you probably couldn't get a great feel for it the way that because Trey was kind of going through it relatively quick for understandable reasons. But as you're going through it as opposed to like having a thought when you're reading, you know, a big PDF, you might have a thought, but then you don't want to bring it up in front of 15 people at a board meeting here. as you're reading it, you can put a comment in the side on the margin and then those comments come to us, you know, to the the CEO and I and we we look at those and then we tailor our agenda based on what people are asking. And so what used to happen was I would go through after preparing this whole you know PDF and PowerPoint then I would go through and I and the CEO and I would then basically regurgitate everything that's in the documents and we would discuss very little and I try I p would pride myself we could get everybody out of there within an hour but no one any no one really learned much or gave much feedback. Now what happens is because of what we're doing, we sit down and we go through the top four to seven issues. Sometimes it's only two or three depending on how critical like whether or not we're going to open a second location, right? That's like could be the only issue at a meeting. And now as I you know I thought people wanted to get out of there quicker. Now we've been using Zack. I think was our third or fourth year using it now. Um now people actually want to meet longer and they've asked me to bring in dinner. uh and we meet for over we meet for two hours because we're actually discussing substantive issues and the feedback I'm getting and the engagement I'm getting and now everybody's on a committee and um it's worked out great and now what our CEO does sends out our monthly reports through it. We do all of our financial reporting through there every month so everybody's making comments and so now there's much more consistent engagement. everybody knows where they can find all the documentation that they need. Um, as we orientate, you know, brand during orientation for new board members, all the information right there on Zack as well. Any kind of, you know, reference guides you need or somebody's trying to help us fun, you know, one of our board members sending out things for our fundraisers, they can go get all the documents right from Zack. And so, everyone knows exactly where to go to to get any information that they need. Um, even our board application is on Zack now. So, um, it's completely changed our engagement and our our effectiveness and it's and it's really been probably one of the most instrumental changes for the, you know, for how we operate our clinic. >> That's awesome. Um, you literally went through pretty much all of my questions and one beautiful piece of art that you just did. So, I love it. Um, I want to ask anyone out there too, if you have any questions for Ian, um, please chime in because I love hearing his real real world perspective. Um, also Ian, I didn't know if like you have a specific feature that is something that you love. I know you like the analytics, so maybe that's it, but do you use the AI and have help? >> Yeah. No, the AI is great. So, um, you guys have actually been really helpful with that too, predominantly with our CEO. So we we track a tremendous amount of information. A lot of it's because of grants or or certain things that we get. And so we we need to track everything. And so what we're using quite frequently, we put together the presentation and we're using Zach to to summarize and break down the information so it's more digestible uh for our board members and trying to make it just much more uh streamlined. So you know, I'm not a big fan of I like efficiency. Um, I don't like wasting people's time. I don't like sitting around a you know, my mom was a chair of the board for a while. Um, and uh, you know, she loved having just a lot of chitchat and the meetings would be two hours. Uh, and that was back in the day when I was, you know, grinding and working 16 hours a day and traveling every week for business. I just wanted to get what I needed, get in there, get out, and, you know, be very focused. And so, I'm very respectful of people's time. And I think that um whether it's the AI component or just the way we communicate through Zach um like I I can it's amazing to me as the board chair that I can you know after our after the Ze is sent out we and I think it's really important to get the Ze out. We're not always as good as we need to be but I think you really need to get it out like two weeks before a meeting, right? Give people time to digest it. Let the comments come back and forth. But I can really get I you know based on how I'm able to use Zech now with my board, I can really get a great sense of what's on people's mind, what's going to happen at this board meeting, what you know, what are the things and and I will go back and a lot of times and and before the meeting completely change what I think we're going to talk about because there's a whole issue that I've just completely either ignored or because I'm so in the trenches, you know, as we're sharing the information with everybody, I didn't realize either a how confusing or you know I just assume this is like a non-issue for people and it's actually a big issue. And so when those comments start coming in uh from the Zach um on the notes that that to me uh allows us to I know what's on people's mind. I know what I need to address and I know what's most important. So to me that's the the communication is what creates the engagement. >> Yeah, I love that. Um, Dana asked a question why you chose Zack over competition. You know, um, most people switched to us because they weren't using anything or maybe they using just a portal. So, you have any insight on that? >> Yeah. So, you know, it's a while ago now, so I don't really even quite honestly I don't necessarily remember what some of the competition was doing or why why we actually chose that, but I will say um, for me one of the most compelling and we did it as a trial, right? And so, uh, what I found, um, first of all, the service of the of the Ze team is what really put me over the top, right? So, uh, they're willing to integrate with various softwares, with various programs. I think, you know, I my guess is many of the enhancements that you'd see on the program from today from a couple years ago were probably requests from users, right? I'm assuming that's where a lot of them came from. Um I also you know I've always been when I was deep before I sold my company I was you know really into shareepoint and communicate or we used teams for a while. Um I'm really into you know centralizing you know portals and everybody can have all the information. And I thought that having that along with the communication skills and how the how the, you know, the no longer a deck but a Zack, how that is presented to me, those two things combined um made it a no-brainer for me. >> Yeah. Awesome. Um, Robert, >> yeah, I I can I can add just one note to that because obviously we um prior to launching Zack, we spent months and months researching the space and the conclusion we came to is that there there's something called board portals, right? So the big one is called Diligent, which which I would encourage everyone to check out. Uh it's a different value ad. Yeah. So the portals are a secure repository for your existing PowerPoint. They don't they don't help the operating team at all. And I'm not saying that in a disparaging way. They don't even try. That's that's just not their value ad. as operators who spent again 150 hours building this presentation. We wanted to address that side and make it more efficient for the leadership team to build the presentation ultimately so that these meetings aren't dreadful. Because if the board meeting, which is let's let's just assume these are your four or eight most consequential meetings of the year. if everyone dreads them, they will just naturally be less productive. So part of our goal is to make these more fun and interesting and strategic so that everyone is excited about the board meeting and if they're looking forward to it when you get there, they will be more productive. And again, these what we call board portals, they don't address that at all. It they are a secure repository for your slide deck. And and if you think about it, PowerPoint was built in 1987, right? And if if you build a PowerPoint tomorrow, it doesn't look very different than a PowerPoint you would have built 20 years ago. There is something wrong with that, right? And and I think the following is a is a grandiose analogy, but I'll say it anyway. I I can't stand it when someone sends me documents to sign in the mail with a bunch of little tabs on it that I have to sign with ink and put in a FedEx box and send it back. right now. Yeah, I just like getting a DocYign. I think the portals are to that ink and paper as Ze is to docuine. It's just a significantly more modern approach to an archaic space. >> Yep. >> Maybe Trey could address pricing and and how we do um how multiple use cases work, our customer service, all of that because I think that's also different. Well, Robert, I I just before you go on that important topic, I would I would just say like uh there's no question that our meetings have become much more engaging, interesting. Um and people who never spoke up a word in the meetings are now there's nobody who sits silent in our meetings anymore. Like everybody has something to say. And and one of the other things that I did not even mention too, which the so we have, you know, so my sister happens to be the board secretary. the CEO puts in her report. We have a a financial uh committee chair um and we have we have um someone who who's uh like board recruitment and there's one other drawing a blank on there's one but everybody does their share. I don't have to aggregate it. It goes all right into the Zack. It's all there. You know now the only thing that we have to ask is to make sure everybody who's responsible for putting things in put them in. So it's way more efficient. And then also people feel way more accountable because they know that what they're putting in there is going to get published to the rest of the board. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, >> definitely. Uh Trey, you want to take it away on the >> um Yeah, pricing. Yeah. So, we Well, I'll tell you our our normal pricing, I suppose. So, for most privately held companies, Ze around $12,000 annually. We do a bunch of discounts for nonprofits. So, our standard NPO pricing is $8,900. Um, but what we've done is as a discount for you all. Uh, so the price pricing is $4,900 per year. Uh, and that includes unlimited viewers, unlimited meetings, unlimited support, all of that. You'll get 10 editor seats, which is is almost always enough for for the people creating the content. Um, and the only other note I would say there just because Robert kind of alluded to it is, you know, of course our bread and butter is board meetings, but most of our customers will use us for other things, too. So, if there's an internal meeting or maybe a less formal update to the board that wants to go out, all of those can be done in Ze because of the way we set the pricing. Uh, the more you use it, the better bang for your buck. There's no increase in fees or or pricing there. Uh, we don't want to penalize you for using it for other things, too. Perfect. >> And and Trey, could you talk year you might have mentioned it just the year two pricing? I think Dana asked what the bump is. >> Oh, yeah. It's it's well, I don't want to say it's the exact same price, but there's a 5% uh year-over-year increase. So, same pricing. There's not like some weird bump where it goes back to our retail rates at 8,900. Uh it's the 4,900 plus I think 5%. >> And and Dana, I I also saw you asked a question about what nonprofits use Zach. It's we can't so security is table stakes for us. So we can't say the names of our customers without their explicit permission. But I think it's it's fair to say it's a very wide spectrum. Uh some of the biggest charities in the world use Zach and lots that lots of nonprofits you've never heard of and and everything in between. >> Yeah. And I can say some that allow us to. Um, we have a lot of United Way chapters, fair trade organization, college football hall of fame. I mean, we have there's a ton. Uh, Mara Elephant Project, lots of lots of museums, performing arts center. So, just a a range, a huge range, but we have a a ton of customers in that spectrum. Yeah. Let's see. Oh, yeah. Thank you, Andrew. Um, who doesn't, right? It's coming up. Saturdays, here we go. Uh, all right. I Does anyone have any other questions? Again, we're we're pretty open here, so just ask away. Thanks, Dana. You are awesome. I think we answered all of the questions in the Q&A, unless I missed something, Andrew. Yeah, we did. >> I'm right here. Um, yeah, just double checking. I don't see uh any other ants or uh questions here. You all did a a great job of addressing those as you went. So, thank you. Um and we can go ahead and uh move on to our uh wrap up here. Um just do one more scroll just to double check. I don't want anybody's questions getting lost, but no, I think we got everything. Um yeah, so first of all, I would like to thank everybody for joining us here uh today. Um and a special thank you to all of our speakers for the wonderful conversation. Um yeah, really appreciate you all sharing your knowledge. Um just keep a lookout in your inboxes. Um in the following next few days, we will be sending out um the recording of this and any links to any special offers. Um so keep a lookout for that and uh we will see you at our next session. So once again, thank you all. Um, I hope you all have a great rest of your day. Take care. >> Thanks everybody. >> Thank you. >> Bye >> y'all. Bye.