Why a nonprofit organization should switch to Google suite For nonprofits – The Ultimate Email Provider

As a nonprofit, some of your most important resources today are your digital tools and ho well you use them to make a change and achieve your goals. At the center of these digital resources is your email services. Think of it as the lifeblood of your digital communication ecosystem, the absence of which would cause a lot of inconveniences. 

The trouble is, a lot of nonprofits out there, probably including yours, run on shared or on-site hosted email services, some organizations don’t even know where their emails are hosted. The problem? Not too grave. However, using a shared or on-site hosting email service comes with some issues and challenges related to collaboration with external teams and allies that most organizations are not aware of.

Is there a better solution out there for nonprofits? Of course there are different solutions and G Suite is one of them (specifically, Google Suite for nonprofits), Google’s flagship cloud-based is your best bet to winning the game. G Suite for nonprofits is more than an email service it is a set of collaboration tools.

Moving to Google Suite for Nonprofits gives you a level playing field in the digital world. It also helps organize a lot of your digital tasks, leaving you to focus on what matters most. And did you know that having a G-Suite for Nonprofits if 100% free if your organization is eligible?

In this guide, we would take you through:

• G-Suite and G Suite for Nonprofits–the difference
• The benefits of G-Suite for Nonprofits
• The free digital tools, grants, and Google Ads credit through the Google for NonProfits Program

Let’s get started.

What is G-Suite and Google Suite for Nonprofits?

G Suite, formerly known as Google Apps, is a set of intelligent applications built to simplify productivity, workflow, and a lot more. G Suite packs a lot of high-profile applications and serves as Google’s answer to the many productivity and utility problems facing organizations in the digital age. What does it include then?

One main application offered by G Suite is the professional email services for organizations–think of it as Gmail from your company’s web address. Other applications in the suite offer solutions for spreadsheets, shared calendars, word processing, cloud storage, presentation decks, and a lot more.

If you are a nonprofit organization, then the G Suite for Nonprofits is your best friend. Unlike G Suite which offers solutions from $5 per month per user, G Suite for nonprofits offers all the basic tools and solutions at no cost. It’s built to help nonprofits collaborate effectively, communicate efficiently, and build lasting societal impacts.

The benefits of G-Suite for Nonprofits

Google Suite for nonprofits provides a lot of solutions to help not-for-profit organizations to manage their teams and work efficiently. Among the benefits including:

• Professional email plus excellent digital products
• Efficient and effective communication
• Work without borders – better collaboration
• Better documentation – reports and budgets

Let’s go deeper on what you get as a nonprofit institution for using this service.

1. G Suite gives you more than an email

If your nonprofit is using a different email service, then your service provider is probably only offering you with an “email service”. It then leaves your organization with no option but to use other digital solutions for communication, collaboration, and other more. This slows productivity in the long-term. However, the intelligent G Suite for nonprofits gives you more than just an email service.

Apart from getting your employees their own professional emails, G Suite for nonprofits provides a lot of other solutions. Some of these tools include Google Sheets, Docs, Forms, Slides, Sites, Docs, and many more. If your goal is to have more time to focus on the most important things while keeping your expenditure down, G Suite for non-profits is your best solution.

2. Communicate with your global team, more efficiently

Many nonprofit organizations execute on projects by leveraging a global pool of volunteers. If you are one of such institutions, you are probably aware of the hurdles that come with communicating with people located in different time zones.

The Google Suite for nonprofits has a lot of tools to help you keep in touch with your team of volunteers around the world without geographical limitations of any kind. Your team can get their own professional email addresses linked to your web address. This does not just build trust within the organization but helps for easy communication. Also, G Suite for Non-profits gives you access to Google Hangouts Chat for texting and Hangouts Meet for video calling.

3. Collaborate better–worth without borders

A lot of nonprofits out there leverage talent all over the world. Achieving their goals means that there should be a means to seamlessly sharing work documents and other documented information. The G Suite for Nonprofits is perfect for this job.

There is the Google Calendar which helps your nonprofit to schedule meetings with people of different time zones and set project deadlines to keep volunteers and employees on their toes. With access to other tools such as Docs, Slides, your organization can create and share files, write reports, and build questionnaires, all along, giving everybody access to these documents for excellent reviews and edits.

4. Better reports and budgets–improve funding window

Gaining the needed funds for societal projects is every nonprofit’s goal. The issue is, a badly written report or budget can break your organization’s source of funding.  With Google Sheets, you can prepare excellent budgets for your projects and have them reviewed by your entire team to ensure that you are on track. Delivering a proper presentation to your donors is equally part of the step to acquiring funding. Google Slides is an excellent G Suite tool that will help you build interactive slide decks for your projects so you can impress funding agencies. 

Google for Nonprofits Program

This is where things get exciting. Having a Google Suite for nonprofits account means you’ve already become a Google for Nonprofits member.  Armed with your G Suite account and with access to the Google for Nonprofits Program, you are ready to move your organization to the next level with free digital tools and in-kind Ad credits of thousands of dollars. With this program, you get:

• Free $10,000 in-kind Ads credit for Google advertisements
• Access to Google One Today Application for donations from around the world
• Access to the YouTube Non-profits Program
• Free Google Earth and Maps credit for insightful data analysis

Let’s digest them and see how each one of these benefits can help you achieve more.

1. The Google Ad Grants program–Get more donors for your project

Google is a search engine that accounts for over 70% of the world’s total search engine usage. With this huge number, getting your nonprofit advertised on the world’s largest search engine means a lot for your success.

Through its Google Ad Grants program, the largest search engine offers nonprofits like yours US$10,000 of in-kind advertising credit every month. The organizations use this to run text ads on Google. It also gives organizations free digital tools to help them run successful ad campaigns. Ultimately, these grants are to help nonprofits reach out to a larger number of individuals, donors, and funding agencies. It also helps organizations to get access to local talent and volunteers and raise awareness. All these benefits are possible with a G Suite for Non-profits account.

2. Access to free Google donation tools for fundraising

One of the biggest problems nonprofits face is the lack of access to donations. And for most organizations, the bigger challenge is reaching potential donors. With a G Suite for nonprofits account, Google gives your organization access to free digital tools to help you amplify your cause and garner more donations.

Through the Google One Today application, one non-profit organization is featured each day to allow people to donate towards a cause or project.

3. YouTube Nonprofit Program – tell stories and make a global impact

Running a nonprofit organization is daunting, but the process is always worth experiencing. Your volunteers go through a lot of challenges to solve pressing societal problems. You go through a lot of challenges trying to manage projects and a global team. Through these challenges, it’s always good to document your progress through storytelling. This is where the YouTube Nonprofit program comes in thanks to your G Suite for nonprofit accounts.

The YouTube nonprofit program allows organizations like yours to tell stories about your progress and challenges. You can also use this program to capture stories from your volunteers and how they are changing the world. This program allows you to provide educational videos for your communities, volunteers, and teams. Through these videos, your non-profit can build empathy for your causes, drive more community engagement, and reach a like-minded individual or donor agencies.

4. Create and analyze insightful data with free Google Earth and Maps credit

How far has your nonprofit organization reached? How many lives and community have your projects impacted? And who knows what’s going on at your camp, including your current projects, future ones, etc.?

The Google Suite for nonprofits, through this program, provides nonprofits with free Google Maps credit.  This helps organizations to create insightful data visualizations to monitor and track the impact of projects and help people locate upcoming projects near them.

What next for your non-profit?

In today’s digital world, building a nonprofit doesn’t come easy. Aside from the projects, people, communities, volunteers, and employees need to be managed. Add these tasks to the many digital campaigns you need to run, and you have for yourself a mountain of work to do. With G Suite for Nonprofit and the many benefits that come with the Google for Non-profit Program, you are sure of not just organizing your organization’s digital workflow, but also managing your team and volunteers around the world. 

Want to make sure that your Google Suite for nonprofits is integrated with your other tools and software? Call IndieTech Solutions to check and troubleshoot for you. Our experts can provide IT consultations and provide solutions to your tech-related problems.