>> from Seattle Washington. It's the Q covering AWS. Imagine nonprofit brought to you by Amazon Web >> service is >> Hey, welcome back already. Jeffrey here with the Cube were in >> the waterfront, actually in Seattle, Washington. It's an absolutely gorgeous August day. We're here for the AWS. Imagine nonprofit event. It's the fourth year they've had. It is the first year's been kind of open to the public. It was invitation only. And we're excited to be here for our first time. Our >> guest is here for his first time, too. And >> we're excited to sit down with side L. Nash. He is the vice president. And of I t and C i o for the National Council on Aging. Say great to see you. >> Thank you. Good to see you. Yeah. So, first >> off, just kind of impressions on the event So far. Really good keynotes this morning. And they got a full two days planned for you. >> Yes, it was an excellent good note. Keynote speaks to the speech this morning and, uh, started off talking about impact and how nonprofit organizations make it make a difference in the world. >> Right. So National Council of Aging, the population is aging Maur Every day they keep sending me my my card in the mail that keep pretending I'm not old enough to get. But >> don't try to pretend exactly they are >> double AARP. Thank you very much for the car, but, um, there's a lot of unique challenges with as the population continues to get holding. What are some of your organisation's priorities? How do you address this kind of growing population in our society? >> So I'll share with you some statistics on aging. So there are about 72,000,060 and older adults in the U. S. 70 >> 1,000,000 to three on its growing >> and growing. It will be 92,000,000 in 2030. So it's a growing larger segment of the population. People are living longer, saving less about but half of those so are 60 plus have saving off about $30,000 about 80% off 60 plus have about maybe to chronic disease conditions. So people are living longer, saving less money, and obviously with that, there are a lot of challenges, and this is where we step in. So we step in. Our mission is to help people age healthier and wealthier, try to make sure that they planned correctly for their savings. And they plan correctly also for their convention there chronic diseases and managing their health in general. And so for that, we have a lot off just products, actually that help older adults figuring out there how to live in older and healthy life. One of them is our flagship product, helping people get access to ah, federal, state and local government benefits. It's called benefits. Checkup is the largest system decision support system in the country that helps older adults figuring out how what benefits take all 54 and how to apply. And we walked them through that whole process. >> So it's also not necessarily the most technically astute population, either, especially today seniors who didn't grow up his digital natives like a lot of the kids are today. And >> as you said, your your guys >> objective number one is economic security. Maybe not necessarily number one, but top of the list and then healthy living. And they don't have the benefit of of time for therefore one case and stuff to grow. So these air pretty unique challenges. How are you helping him? And then you know we're here in eight of us. What role has eight of us played in helping you reach your your constituent? >> Clear? You're asking a lot of questions in one. So let me try and answer them one by one. So let's take a >> look at the aging population, especially the older adults. 70 plus those who actually don't have. Ah, I don't know. They're not necessity technology savvy, but they have Ah, they have cell phone. It's over. 73% of them have cell phones and some have smartphones. S o. We looked at the different ways of trying to reach out to them. And one of the things that we experimented with is looking at an SMS texting pilot. So we actually started that pilot and was very successful. And well, now we're rolling out into a full production system. It's a we found out that it's a great channel. It's very simple asking simple questions. Did you apply yes or no? Just answer us if you were to do one or two. So tell us give us a very simple answer and we found that the engagement rates are way above the average industry. People tend to respond to text messages for better than actually telling them. Hey, there's the mobile app. Go download my mobile already So that's one aspect of it on the AWS Sod off it. So when I joined and see away about a year and 1/2 ago, we were in Private Cloud and in that situation we had a lot of single point of failures and disaster recovery was in bad shape. And so we realized that we needed to move into a new and more robust environment, one that solved the single all the risks that we had from disaster recovery. Single point of failures to also being able to innovate quickly and fast. And so we looked that we started the ah migration process to the cloud and we ended up on AWS back in February. This year would move 95% of our assets to the cloud to AWS Cloud and we medicated the two major risks. The single point of failure is disaster recovery and so on. And with that, we also have a lot of other tools that are out of the box that we're using right now with the AWS platform. >> That's great So, um, I want it back up to the S, the best comic cause That's really interesting. So how do you find your customers? How do you get people get engaged? Obviously, art center the card in the mail. You know, there's a lot of organizations that that we get involved with. How do you directly engage with your clients? >> So we do a lot of digital marketing, believe it or not. So we spent a lot off time money and energy into digital marketing on Facebook. So a good number of older adults are on Facebook. There's also a good percentage of them that are on YouTube. Unfortunately, older adults spend about 46 hours watching either TV or videos on the Web, those who have access to the Web. So that's one way we're trying to reach them. So these are our sort of marketing funnels. In addition to that, we have about close to 100 centers around the U. S. Where older those can actually go in and be helped and go walk through the process of applying for federal state local government benefits. And so we have. They're called benefits benefits centers. And so the those centers are open to the public. We also try to collaborate with different with different organizations around the country, through through whom we get older adults too engage with us and joined the benefits checkup program. And with that, we we ask people to our 10. So we take a very cautious and very respectful approach to data and privacy to ask people to opt in. And we tell them about how we're using the data. We encrypt the data address. We take very caring very good care of it. We don't share it outside of organization. So we have our own internal data privacy principles. So we take this matter very seriously again. Our objectives always the hope older adults live a better, healthier and wealthier life, >> right? I just love that the older people are now using Facebook and SMS like kids. >> 15 years ago, they moved on >> to other platforms. Thank goodness for the old folks keeping the Facebook and, uh >> so let's shift gears. A little >> bit of talk about your transformation in your movement to the cloud. How big of an effort was that? How long did it take? And, you know, hasn't really opened up the innovation because there's clearly cost savings. And as you talked about a single point of failure and kind of mitigating the negatives, but as well as we've seen over and over again, really, the benefits from from Cloud are really that innovation and delivering service is faster. So how's your experience? >> That's exactly right. So So let me talk a little bit about the traditional transformation. So about, I would say, year over year ago, we started our digital transformation initiative. It's really focused on customers, we call it, knowing our customers as individuals with individual needs. Traditionally organizations like ours looked at older adults. In the perspective, off percentages averages, on average is is how old they are on average, in this is their income. On average, this is their health. But in reality, every older adult is an individual that has specific and individual needs, and we need to really take a look at that and caters to those very specific needs that they actually changed over time. So the transformation really enabled it. We needed to move to a cloud where we can have products immediately that we can spend off and use a I machine learning products and so on. And so I'm gonna go back and talking more about our a digital transformation and the perspectives off it. So our objective long term is to build was recalling the the aging Well, aye aye. Engine. It's basically imagine an older adult waking up in the morning and trying to decide what are the top best three things for me to do. Stop the actions for me to do to improve my life. And we wanna help that older adult make those decisions easily and quickly through a frictionless interactions. Frictionless. Conversational. Aye, aye. Speaking to an Alexa like voice enabled smart speaker asking Alexa, what should I do today? Alexis, respond. The weather is nice out there. Call your friend. Go for a walk. Call your doctor, get the lab results and so on. And check your benefits on benefits. Check up and figure out and improve your life. So the idea is to really get the person to actively and the actively using technology and simple, frictionless way to be able to make those decisions that improve their lives. So for us to do this kind of work to build the aging. Well, Aye, aye. Engine. It is impossible without being on a cloud like >> a w. Interesting. So, uh, first time I've heard about Lexus since we've been here. A lot of talk about Lex at the education conference a couple of weeks back. So is Alexa. Pretty key piece of your strategy going forward, you really see voice as a different type of communication. You mentioned. That's a message. Just kind of old, but really effective. How do you see Alexa playing >> so absolutely so voice enabled communication channels. So we look at it as actually we look at our communication with older adults. We look at it as an Army channel communication. Every person have their own preference of the way they interact with technology. Some people prefer SMS. Others like to speak to Alexa. Others like to go through the web and so on. Some are on Facebook or YouTube, etcetera. So each we have our own choices. And that's exactly why we need to look at the older adults as individuals with their individual needs. And then our job is to deliver those to deliver all products through those different channels individually. So delivering the right product with the right customer at the right time and through the right channels. So lax is one of the channels it is. It's not the only channel or the voice channel I would call it is not the only channels. What we found out is that older adults find Alexis is very engaging. It reduces social isolation. It helps with the many other tests, especially for those who are visually inferred. The the complexity. The challenge for older adults is setting it up, so that's what we're trying to look at. Ways of trying to packages will be package so that it is possible for the older adult to plug it in and be able to use it. The other thing that we discovered, we probably need to look at family caregivers as the customer segment of the customer target that we would work with really enable looks, um, >> interesting. Let's see, it seems like a natural fit once you get kind of the tone and the and the comfort worked out, and I would imagine you're writing all types of specific things for to do and types of activities for Alexa to do for the specific needs of this older generation, >> so yeah. So we started >> a very small proof of concept project with Alexa trying to engage an experiment for me, everything that we do has to bring in value. And I need to also make sure that we are when we deliver a product or customers. That product actually delivers that value and engages the customers. So we know that there are there is the value in there were also working with partners on delivering this voice channel. So I know that we have, as a non profit organization with our, you know, a limited resource is. And so we look at partners as a way to enable those votes channels on the different channels that we have >> exciting, exciting times. And I look forward to watching that innovation pulls out at a high rate of speed. So thanks for taking a few minutes and safe travels home. >> Okay. Thank you, Seed. I'm Jeff. You're watching the keyboard aws. Imagine >> in Seattle. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time