086 – Dropbox Secrets for Your Non-Profit with Account Manager Jeff Sage

Episode Transcription

David Pisarek: In this episode, we’re going to be talking all things about file management and data storage. You need to tune into this. If you are more than one person in your team, pay attention and listen up to this episode.

Welcome to the Non-profit Digital Success podcast. I’m your host, David. In this episode, we’re going to be talking about file storage with Jeff Sage.

Jeff is a seasoned distribution account manager with Dropbox, where he’s honed his expertise over the last seven years. He’s super passionate about empowering organizations with efficient digital solutions.

Jeff collaborates with us at Wow Digital to provide non-profits and charities with seamless file sync, e-signature functionalities, and more. His dedication helps ensure that these organizations, like yours, can focus on what matters most: making a positive impact in your community.

Through his collaborative efforts with Wow Digital, Jeff aids in simplifying the digital landscape for non-profits, charities, enabling them and you to optimize your marketing, communication, and digital operations effortlessly. A little bit of a mouthful. But Jeff, thank you so much for joining in today.

Jeff Sage: Awesome. Yeah. Thanks for having me, David. I really appreciate the time. I’ve been following the podcast for a while now, so I’m looking forward to this episode.

Yeah, I’m definitely passionate about wanting to talk about file sync and sharing and some of the different things that we’re doing today.

David Pisarek: Yeah, and it looks like you’re also passionate about Star Wars.

Jeff Sage: I am. Sometimes it’s referred to as an addiction, but my passion is Dropbox and file sharing and also Star Wars.

David Pisarek: Amazing. So let’s dive in and let’s just start at the beginning. What is Dropbox?

Jeff Sage: Yeah, it’s a great question.

A lot of people from a Dropbox perspective, a lot of people know about Dropbox.

The issue is a lot of people think they know more than they do about Dropbox, and then you start going back through of like, okay, they know traditionally that it’s file sync and share, but not some of the other features that have been released over the last couple of years, which obviously that’s why we’re here. But that’s been a big one on the Dropbox side.

David Pisarek: Yeah, and Dropbox, I love the name, so much so that I have a network drive locally here. And before Dropbox even it existed. I called it Dropbox. And so I have two Dropboxes on my machine.

I’ve got my local storage, and then I’ve got my Dropbox business account that we’ve got for my agency, and I’ve got synchronizing happening between those. What are the benefits for non-profits or charities around using Dropbox, even the free version?

Jeff Sage: Yeah. The biggest thing about Dropbox is, like we talked about, people have been utilizing it for years.

When I joined Dropbox, it was the first company that I joined where I didn’t have to explain at the dinner table what it actually did.

From a business perspective and from just a personal perspective, it’s easy to use. People are familiar with it. People are sharing it with college papers.

They are sharing it with grandma and grandpa to share pictures in Florida. Then what happens is a lot of people develop those workflows, even on a personal level, sharing things with family members.

Then they start dragging it into the business part of it and realize how easy it is to use from a collaboration standpoint in their business as well. So they start building out those workflows around that.

To answer your question, it allows you to share anywhere in the world with anyone that you want to, securely if you want to as well. But it allows you to do that, and it allows you to do that not just in one ecosystem.

So if you’re using Microsoft or Adobe or something along those lines, you can actually utilize that in Dropbox via file previews or any of those kinds of things.

And it’s agnostic to an OS as well. So you can be on an Apple, and I can share with you, David, and you’re on a Windows machine, I can share that within Dropbox and not have any issues with that.

David Pisarek: But really does level the playing field in terms of platforms sending files back and forth. I really think Zoom, for example, took a really big liftoff during COVID as people hopped in, they have a free account, that type of thing.

I see Dropbox as a similar thing where there was a lot of people going, “All right, we need to be able to send these files and bin files.” And Bing files, a lot of the email systems have limitations around the size of file that you can actually send through it.

Jeff Sage: Yeah, no, absolutety. It’s a great point. And we did.

We had a very big uptick as far as the work-from-home scenario. Dropbox actually moved to a full work-from-home. During COVID, we moved everybody out of the office, and now Dropbox remains out of the office. It’s purely collaboration in field, right? From home.

David Pisarek: Yeah, and not only that, it could also do it from your phone, right? You can have synchronizing from your phone.

One of the things I like about Dropbox is if I take any pictures or videos, I have them automatically back to Dropbox. If I lost my phone or my phone broke, I still have a copy of everything, and I don’t necessarily need to rely on having the phone to do that.

Or I can grab links to files that are in there and email them as I’m on the go to other people.

Jeff Sage: Yeah, you can do iPad, you can do phone. Any device that you can connect to the internet can actually get into Dropbox.

Again, your computer is broken, you lose the computer, so your files are always there. You’re not having to connect to a server or anything along those lines.

David Pisarek: Okay, so we’ve got Dropbox, and there’s a plethora of other online systems for file storage. If you’re a Google Shop, Google Workspace, you’ve got data storage in there. If you’re Microsoft, you’ve got data storage there or SharePoint for non-profits. What would you say are the differences between you and those?

Jeff Sage: I love this type of question, David because we get it obviously a lot.

There’s a ton of cloud providers that are out there. Dropbox is a better together. We do actually work with Microsoft and Google. In fact, you’ll find on our website, you can create Google Docs right in Dropbox folders.

Same thing with Microsoft. We’re like the single largest repository of Microsoft folders in the world, even beyond Microsoft and OneDrive. But we do work really closely with them. We do a lot of API connectors with each of those products.

With that being said, they do have some limitations. Obviously, you’re finding the right content and where to put it. It’s a tough job for organizations to figure that out.

One of the big ones that we see with Google these days is they have a 750 gig limit per day. What happens is if you have large media files or large video files, it’s very challenging in a Google environment.

If you have more than one of those, that’ll chew you up pretty quick, and it breaks that collaboration. So Dropbox is really focused on getting work done and getting work done fast wherever you’re at.

So we try not to break collaboration with our platform, where we got some Google-type things with a 750 gig limit that breaks collaboration.

I think the other piece that we do really well is we do block-level sync. We also do land sync. So what that means is we only change the bits of the file that change. I’m in a file, I’m not uploading the entire file every time.

I’m just uploading those little bits that change throughout the day. I also think that what we do really well from a Google perspective is we have shareable links, and they support password protection and expiration dates. We have one-click shareable links from a desktop.

We also have a 30-day rollback. As we discussed at the beginning, some of the things that people don’t know are that Dropbox now offers a 90-day retention policy with holds and data governance packages. That’s a 90-day piece. Really quickly, I’ll touch on the Microsoft piece.

Look, if you want to stay in a Microsoft ecosystem and you’re working internally in Microsoft, that’s great. It’s a solution. What happens is when you start to move outside of Microsoft and Google’s ecosystem, the formatting starts to change.

How frustrating that is when you actually upload a document. If Microsoft, then you share with somebody outside your org and Google, and they’re like, “Shit, it’s all formatted or incorrect.” We see a lot of that, and that’s why we actually, again, partner up with Google and Microsoft in those regards.

The last piece is on the SharePoint piece. We talked about training at the beginning, again.

Training within a Microsoft SharePoint environment is challenging. You have to take time to learn how to actually utilize it. Don’t do that in Dropbox. It’s the same tool that you used in college that you’re using in your business environment.

So the client doesn’t see any change. There’s a lot of pieces where you actually have to train on SharePoint itself, and it comes down to really just getting work done. We don’t want to be the prohibitor.

We don’t want to be the application that prohibits you from getting work and content done wherever you’re at.

David Pisarek: Yeah, let’s enable.

Let’s make it easy for people to do the work that they need to do and not spend time hunting around for where “Where did this person in the team save it? They’re off on vacation. I can’t reach them. They’re sick. They’ve left the organization.” Absolutely. Okay, so awesome. Thank you for helping people who are listening to this if they’re not that familiar with drop-ups.

There’s something called Dropbox Replay. How can marketing teams leverage a tool like that?

Jeff Sage: Yeah, so Replay is say, reducing chaos around video and imaging and media stuff.

What we mean by it reduces chaos is, let’s say, David, we’re working with a bunch of people. We have 10 people that are working on some media-rich content. We can bring those people in via replay.

We can pull them into a live feed on the video, and we can actually circle comments. We can make priority comments so that everybody’s on the same page and you’re working in one piece.

So it reduces that amount of like, I’m sending an email to David, “Hey, look at this video, and edit it and then send it back to me, and then you send it to Joe in Japan, and he’s got to do his thing and send it back.” It reduces that time to get finalized content done.

But then the other pieces are is what happens when we’re editing videos a lot of times, people don’t know what in the video you want them to see.

So for instance, like minute two, there’s something that’s happening there that I really want you to see. I can actually circle areas or put a comment out to the side so that when minute two pops up, it’s going to pop up that comment so that you’re not distracted looking for the piece that I want you to look at.

It’ll pop up on minute two and say, “David, look at this area. I want you to fix this area.” It provides some really good content control, but also just, again, that collaboration is easy to use. We see a lot of people that are utilizing it today. Again, it’s that pinning things for high priority, and then just getting everybody on the same page.

That’s the hardest part with collaboration. You’ll see that throughout our conversation today is, getting people organized enough to be able to collaborate and to control content so that they’re not wasting time.

David Pisarek: Yeah. And video is what a lot of people listening to this episode should be focusing on.

If you want to drive your organization forward, you really do need to be doing some video, even if 20, 30-second clip with your phone, you can record it, get into Dropbox, and share it with your manager, your director, your VP, your CEO, your president, your teammates, in a way that’s simpler than being like, “All right, I’m going to upload this to my personal YouTube.”

Leave it as unlisted, send you a link, get some feedback, go back in, make some edits. So it really does lead that circle in terms of helping people manage their day-to-day workflow.

Jeff Sage: It’s great that you say the video content, too, because within Dropbox itself, too. So not just the replay pieces for the media and controlling content there.

But we also have a feature now called Dropbox Capture, which, if you think about it from a training perspective, I can actually pop up a video bubble of me sitting on the right-hand side where I’m actually controlling the screen and walking them through, but it’s instructions.

But they see me on video, so that content is digestible, and it’s a little more personable than just, “Hey, read this, do this.” They can actually follow along and see me on video. That’s a cool feature, too.

David Pisarek: There’s other tools that people are using for that.

Maybe you can get rid of your license for that. Use this tool and just save some money with your budget.

It’s not just collaborative, but it’ll also save you some time switching between tools and, ideally, a little bit of money. Something I want to talk about next is the acquisition of signs.

A few years ago, Dropbox acquired HelloSign. I think that’s what it was called.

Now, in Dropbox, you can have documents that require signatures. Imagine HR being able to send contracts to new employees or strategic partners that you’re working with or volunteers or NDAs or, or, or, or. It really does bring that into the realm of grouping and collaboration and then bundling together to save you, again, the time and the money.

Let’s talk about Dropbox Sign. How does that compare to other signing tools that are out there? Why should a non-profit consider using it?

Jeff Sage: Yeah. So Dropbox bought HelloSign, now called Dropbox Sign.

So, it’s part of our messaging around Dropbox, which is more than just file sync and sharing these days.

Dropbox Sign is a big one for us. It’s growing by leaps and bounds. As far as a competitive landscape, it’s a common theme, right? Ease of use, document security, and flexibility. So not just on your files that are saved, but also flexibility on pricing models.

One of those that we do a little bit differently is our ease of use. One of the reasons Dropbox loved HelloSign from an acquisition standpoint is because it fell into that whole Dropbox messaging where we didn’t want a bunch of training needed for it.

We wanted to be able to have somebody roll it out and roll it out quickly, because a lot of times people don’t even think they need eSignature until it’s too late or they got to scramble to get an eSignature doc done.

From an ease-of-use standpoint, we can roll it out. It usually rolls out within 48 hours tops. Sometimes, it’s even 8 to 10 hours that we’re rolling it out. From a security play, we are SOC 1, 2, and 3 in HIPAA compliance on the documents.

They’re also stamped. So, Anytime there’s anything going on with that document, it’s stamped with an IP address as well. The other piece is from a flexible pricing standpoint.

So from a differentiator, I offer a lot of different things. So what happens is with Dropbox sign, I can offer you maximum signatures, so you buy into a signature pool per year, or you can buy unlimited plan.

So if you think that you’re going to have a ton of signatures, you can just buy an unlimited plan and be good to go throughout the whole year.

The other differentiator is that Dropbox is adding templates and documents We bought another company recently, too, that actually has a lot of templates. They’re actually being added to Dropbox as well. So you don’t have to go pick and find documents or creation of documents. So we have a lot of that.

The last piece, David, is that a lot of companies now, they are locked into three-year agreement with a competitor. When that competitor decides that, “Hey, the three years is up,” or they’re trying to negotiate with them on pricing, or they want to explore some other e-signature product, that particular company is actually holding them to almost like a ransom scenario where they can’t get those files out of there to move them to somebody else.

We don’t do that. The content that’s being shared within Dropbox and Dropbox Sign is your content. We don’t share it, we don’t review it. It’s yours. You can pull it out or in whenever you want to. I think that’s where we actually view things a little bit differently than some of our competitors.

David Pisarek: At Wow Digital, we use Dropbox Sign. We use Dropbox.

We’re in there every day, multiple times a day. We use it for contracts, we use it for NDAs, we use it for all kinds of stuff like that. It really is simple, similar to what you can do in Acrobat Pro, where you can make fillables and then you can send them out. Then, it gets an email notification when somebody signs it. You can check and see who signed and who hasn’t yet.

Jeff Sage: Yeah. In the dashboard, you can actually check out and see what the flow looks like.

If David signed it, if he hasn’t signed it, you can send a reminder out. I can send a reminder out to David. It’s “Hey, been a week. You haven’t seen it.” The other part that it does within Dropbox Sign is it actually sends automatic notifications.

If the person doesn’t sign, it’ll send them an email saying, “Hey, you haven’t signed this in the last couple of days.” You also, David, will actually get a summary each day. If you forget, “Oh, my God, I got these four signatures out,” it’ll send you a reminder to say, “Hey, you got these guys that are still out for a signature.”

David Pisarek: Yeah. I think organizations of any size can certainly use this. There really isn’t anything that you couldn’t use this for when you’re working with anything that needs a signature.

Jeff Sage: Let me give you a quick example.

We have school districts. A lot of school districts have moved to Dropbox Sign. Every year, they have to send out documentation on teachers and people who are with the school district and salary information.

What they do is they use an Excel sheet to plug in all that information. Then what they’ll do is they’ll put a Dropbox sign document in there, and then they’ll assign those fields so that it creates a templatization so that when they get ready to sign and send out, they can actually use that Excel sheet to define those fields and pull those people in so that they don’t have to each one do that. It saves a lot of time. It’s a huge benefit.

David Pisarek: Imagine as a non-profit, you want to have a pledge. You can get people signing up online. Then you can send out these pledge documents to them and automate that process.

This is essentially a really amazing way to do automation. You can create a really beautifully designed template. You can stick a PDF into this thing, put the fields, and have it sent out.

You can have a really beautiful-looking certificate or document. In terms of Dropbox, there’s different tiers of Dropbox. As a non-profit, should they be considering the business here in terms of privacy, HIPAA compliance, SOC compliance, all that type of stuff?

Jeff Sage:

What you want to do as a non-profit, though, is you also want to make sure that the content that people are creating for your non-profit stays within that non-profit.

A lot of times, I think people forget that you work for a non-profit or you work for a business. The content that you’re creating is for that particular business that’s paying you.

From a business perspective, Dropbox is about securing content for the non-profit or the company. And we do that via Dropbox business through an admin portal.

So for instance, David, if you are working for our non-profit, we’re creating content, you decide to leave the non-profit because you want to go work for this next great big one over here.

What I can do is I can actually remote wipe you.

So, within Dropbox, if you’re on free, I can’t do that. I don’t have any control over seeing what documents you’re sharing or who you’re sharing with. On business, I do. And I can remotely wipe as you’re walking out the door.

You can’t take that content, that stuff. It allows that control. It sounds really horrible about Big Brother, but again, it’s about securing the content that that person is creating within your non-profit so that it doesn’t leave your walls.

David Pisarek: As a non-profit, you need to decide for yourself what your comfort level is there.

If it’s just you and a couple of people, it might be totally fine. But as you grow, as you bring people in, we know in non-profits, people come and go.

You have volunteers who are helping, and you have students who are helping. It really does help to make sure that your stuff stays with you.

Let’s say you’ve got contracts in there, you want to make sure you’re on a tier that allows you access to be able to walk and review who files are being shared with in case you ever need to go through an audit.

Jeff Sage: Well, or even, too, you have a file that me and you are working on that’s important and I delete something, being able to roll that back. So Dropbox has rollback that you can rollback in all days, weeks, whatever.

David Pisarek: Certainly over the last year, but more specifically, the last couple of months, there’s been a number data breaches and things like that that have made it into the media. We’ve got crypto-blocking things that happen. So, let’s talk about backups and restore and recovery.

Jeff Sage: Sure. So a couple of different things that Dropbox is doing differently.

So we have full rollback capability within Dropbox. All three of our levels of Dropbox, the non-profit pricing actually has that as well. All three of those product flavors actually have 30-day rollback. You don’t have to call Dropbox. It’s literally just a slider on the right-hand side.

You can slide back to any date. Before your crypto hit or before any your virus type things hit, not only me deleting something, but just I can roll a file back, or I can roll a folder back, or I can roll the entire team back. Really easy, simple slider. When I first joined Dropbox, I had to call Dropbox to get that done.

The other piece with our backup and recovery is we also have a 90-day data retention policy now, so you can actually add that to your Dropbox, and that allows 90 days. It allows legal holds as well.

If a non-profit needs to hold something from a legality standpoint, you could put a legal hold, and it’ll start tracking even more intensely with that person sharing.

The last part is we actually now do attached storage backup as well.

If I have a USB drive, when I plug it into my computer, it’s immediately, if I have Dropbox loaded on it, it’ll immediately pop up and say, “Would you like to back up this USB drive or this drive?” If I don’t back it up within a certain amount of time, too, let’s say it’s been a week, Dropbox will send me a reminder saying, “Hey, remember this storage you attached? We want to back that up again.”

It takes that effort to remember things that you don’t want to remember because you just want to create that content. You want to make sure that your content is safe and secure. But I think from a backup perspective, we do that really well. It’s something we’ve done since day one, and we just work on trying to continue to improve that.

David Pisarek: One of the things I really enjoy about Dropbox is that you’ve got this cloud sync. I recently had an issue with my computer where it just died, gone. I had all my stuff sitting in Dropbox.

So getting the computer repaired, wiping a hard drive, hearts die on computers. Being able to not have to worry that “Where did all my files go? Oh, my goodness.” You don’t have to think about that.

Jeff Sage: It’s the whole reason Dropbox was founded.

Many people have heard this story, but I think it’s very interesting because Drew Houston was travelling on a bus from up here in the Boston area down to New York.

He had his computer and his USB drive, left his USB drive on the bus, and realized, “Oh, my God, I got this great big presentation I’m supposed to be doing. I don’t have my files. What am I going to do?” That’s how this whole thing started back in the day.

It’s got to be a simpler way for me to be able to just go and log on to a computer and have my files. That’s the genesis of the idea.

David Pisarek: One last thing that I want to talk about with this is, do you really know your team? Let’s say you’re a smallish, maybe growing organization.

If you’re a bigger organization, you’ve got 200 people, this would apply even more to you. Dropbox can run a report on your domain name and then find all three Dropbox accounts that exist using that domain name.

But you can really get a handle as to how many accounts are out there, how much data is in those accounts as well. You can go, “Oh, I didn’t know there were 34 accounts out there on this free one,” and what type of stuff is going on in there? When you start getting into thinking that way, getting a report like that will help you identify potential risks associated with your organization.

Jeff Sage: I really like to refer to it as domain assessment.

The reason I refer to it as an assessment is it’s used to think about those workflows.

If you see 100 people utilizing the org and you’ve spent money on SharePoint or other areas, it might make you reevaluate and requestion some of the departments and go back to some of those departments like accounting or anybody else and say, “Hey, how are you utilizing your tools today? How is the workflow being built?” Because obviously, you got some holes there.

If you’re spending money on something and people are bringing in a free tool, then you have that content protection issue. We want to help to actually build out that workflow, build out that conversation, and secure it.

David Pisarek: Jeff, amazing conversation today around data storage, data protection, how non-profits can leverage file cloud-based systems across their organization.

Even if it’s food for thought, like, “Oh, you know what? I didn’t think about this. Maybe I can use this in this way.” I want to ask you, do you have a challenge for anybody who’s listening to this episode to do as a next step?

Jeff Sage: Yeah, my challenge would be, don’t just think you know everything around Dropbox. We’re changing every day. We are very focused on the end-user and the client relationship where others don’t.

They focus more on some other stuff. But so what I would say is, if you haven’t used Dropbox in a while or you haven’t used a free copy of Dropbox, at least do that. Find out what’s available to you.

Hopefully, there’s enough nuggets here that we’ve given you today, part of that conversation, as a breadcrumb, right? So lots of breadcrumbs make up the whole loaf, make up a slice of bread.

So take some of those breadcrumbs, reach out to David, reach out to other members, get involved, and try to figure out what’s going on in your environment.

David Pisarek: Before the episode we were talking, you’ve got a little bit of a giveaway. What’s this giveaway that you’ve got?

Jeff Sage: It’s a really nice travel bag. So leather straps, cloth bag. I actually have one. I love it. Yeah, we wanted to do that as an appreciation for hanging out, listening to us.

David Pisarek: Amazing.

So, if you’re interested in getting the Weekender Dropbox bag, it sounds super, super awesome. We’ll actually have a photo of that on the show notes page.