Essential Digital Tools (Pandemic Edition)
Facilitated by Jessa Agilo, Founder, ArtsPond
October 2, October 9, October 23 and October 30, 2020 | 1:00 to 4:30 pm Eastern each day
Cultural Pluralism in the Arts Movement Ontario presents Essential Digital Tools (Pandemic Edition) with Jessa Agilo, the first in a series of Digital Tools Professional Development webinars that bring Indigenous, Black, Brown, and other racialized artists and arts organizations together to help navigate through post COVID-19 strategies using digital tools. “Essential Digital Tools” provides a whirlwind but fun and informative introduction to the essential digital tools and software in Jessa’s front and back pockets for managing time, money, people, building creative programming, and engaging community. Learn from her 30 years of experience combining free, open source, and low-cost tools and applications to manage small to large teams from home on a tight budget.
DAY 1
Compare the benefits and challenges of popular productivity suites including Microsoft Office365 E2 for Nonprofits, Google for Nonprofits, Open Office, and other alternatives for free/low-cost internal and remote back-office admin. Receive tips on other helpful free, open source, and low cost tools for managing internal digital assets, time, people, and money in demanding cross-platform environments for OS/iOS and Windows/Android. See examples of ArtsPond’s growing remote national digital office in action and learn about the factors that influenced its design and implementation. Explore strategies and templates for using spreadsheets like Excel and Google Sheets as viable alternatives to expensive databases and business enterprise software. Explore browser extensions/add-on’s, security, and syncing of devices and profiles across multiple domains.
Day 2
Compare the benefits and challenges of popular design and communications suites like Adobe with open source, free/low-cost alternatives to amplify your public outreach, accessibility, and interactivity on-the-ground and in-the-cloud. Explore CPanel and WordPress website hosting for non-developers without breaking your brain or emptying the bank. Look at free and open source constituency relationship management (CRM) options with CiviCRM, SuiteCRM, and MailChimp, livestreaming to Facebook, YouTube, Twitch, Instagram and other services with OBS Studio and YellowDuck, accessibility services with Otter.ai and other alternatives, research support with Zotero, strategies for sharing remote desktops, cloud and onsite digital asset backups, best practices for Zoom video conferencing and other alternatives.
DAY 3
Become a power Quickbooks and spreadsheet user for managing people, time, and money. See examples and learn how to build all the tools that you need. Explore how just a few spreadsheet features (filters, pivot tables, mail merges) and functions (VLOOKUP, SUMIF, IFS and more) can boost efficiency and automation of everyday business activities. Gain access to sample financial, HR, and activity reporting templates from ArtsPond’s office and learn how to build them on your own. Ask questions about financial and project management challenges and receive thoughts or recommendations on how to improve or do things differently.
DAY 4
A hand’s on workshop for non-developers to learn how to install and powerup a multi-user Office365 environment and a new WordPress website on a custom domain with CPanel hosting (or hosted by WordPress). For Office365, setup and use SharePoint, Teams, Planner, Yammer, OneNote, OneDrive, and more. On WordPress, learn how to install themes, create and update content, address site SEO settings, backup and keep it secure, migrate content to another location, set up a testing server on your local machine for play before launch, choosing between the best of free and paid plugins to extend functionality, examining options for hosting ecommerce or social networking functionality, setting up multiple user accounts with permissions, syncing up content and contact lists with Mailchimp and social media. Explore SSL certificates, hosting other open source software solutions to extend functionalities, and choose a hosting plan that works for you for the future.
For this workshop, if you do not already have access, participants from nonprofit organizations in Canada are encouraged to request accounts for Microsoft Office365 E2 for Nonprofits from TechSoup Canada. Approval process can take 10 days. For those that are unable to do so, a temporary account will be provided to participants by ArtsPond for 90 days to explore the platform.
