Face-to-Face Communications with Zoom Help NGOs Around the Planet

A few months ago, TechSoup was able to launch a donation program for nonprofits in over 40 countries simultaneously for the first time. This milestone was made possible in part by the use of the online conferencing platform Zoom. As a nonprofit and part of the TechSoup Global Network of 70 civil society organizations, TechSoup has come to rely on Zoom.

TechSoup uses Zoom to help staff members coordinate to deliver resources and education. TechSoup's staff also uses it to facilitate philanthropic support to tens of thousands of nonprofits, from the Girl Scouts of Eastern Oklahoma to the Tax Busters in Serbia.

We Shopped Around, and Zoom Is a Great Solution

How does Zoom compare to other conferencing platforms? For starters, Zoom has excellent video and audio quality, and it is easy to use. Zoom also has lots of features we like. Here are some of them that we use.

• An Outlook plug-in for scheduling meetings
• Smartphone apps for iOS and Android
• An on-screen tile view to enhance the group experience
• Easy screen sharing of presentations
• The ability to share YouTube videos in real time
• Helpful recording features such as the option to save recordings of video conferences on your laptop, without requiring the expense of cloud storage fees

Zoom fits well with our Windows-based network; everyone at TechSoup uses their regular username and password to get in to Zoom. For all you techies, Zoom is able to do single sign-on (SSO) with our Azure Active Directory service. This makes it easy for our IT department to provision new users.

Zoom's Admin Dashboard and Customer Support Are Excellent

I wear many hats at TechSoup, and Zoom's excellent admin dashboard helps me supervise our account quickly and easily. Orienting new users is a breeze, because Zoom's training videos are short and to the point. And Zoom customer support is fabulous. On the rare occasions when we have a need, Zoom customer support responds quickly, often explaining the solution with easy-to-understand screenshots.

Zoom Is the Wand; the People We Serve Are the Magic

Zoom is a great tool to help our staff coordinate the delivery of services, but sometimes people think innovative tech like this is itself the entire solution to the challenges facing nonprofits. However, the magic isn't in the wand. It's in the nonprofits we serve when they have the knowledge they need to accomplish their mission. As CEO Richard Aston of New Zealand's Big Buddy Mentoring Trust put it in a thank-you note to TechSoup, "Without solid advice and knowledge, technology can be a curse rather than a gift."

This Just In! Zoom for Nonprofits Is Coming to TechSoup

Zoom will soon be available for nonprofits as a U.S. discount program through TechSoup. We hope to have this exciting new offering available to you in fall 2017. Nonprofits will receive a 50 percent discount on one year of the following Zoom services:

• Zoom Meetings Pro Plan
  
• Zoom Meetings Business Plan
• Zoom Rooms
• Zoom Video Webinars
• Zoom Cloud Room Connector

These discounted services will be renewable each year and will be open to nonprofits of all mission types with budgets of $10 million and below. The offer will also be available for foundations, public libraries, and religious organizations. Please sign up for our TechSoup newsletters to get your earliest possible notification about the launch date of this exciting new benefit to our members.

About the Author

Glenn Hirsch is manager of internal communication and administration at TechSoup.

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