Simplify your nonprofit’s communication with cloud email (for free!)

I work with a lot of nonprofit organizations: churches, regional offices for denominations, charities, board-governed organizations, and more. Most of the time, communication is one of their biggest challenges.

In the case of a local church, their ministry leadership and clergy emails will often be a mix of Gmail, Hotmail, and internet service provider inboxes, and their public-facing email address might be something like “[email protected].” This setup works well enough if you're a team of only three or four people, but as the team grows, this kind of decentralized communication can present some significant obstacles, such as:

• Keeping track of valid email addresses
• Difficulty in sharing files due to various email providers’ differing spam filters and policies
• MailChimp emails ending up in recipients’ spam folders because you're sending from an unverified address like [email protected]
• Confusion over different versions of shared documents among the team

Bring order to chaos with cloud email - free for nonprofits!

The good news is that there are excellent solutions available today to bring order to your organization’s communication. And if you're a registered nonprofit organization, many of them are available for free. For example, Google offers a powerful set of tools called Google Workspace, which includes domain-based email inboxes powered by Gmail, shared documents and calendars, video chat, user management, and even Google Classroom for education or nonprofit accounts.

With Google Workspace, you can create an unlimited number of accounts for your team, each with its own @yourdomain.com address, such as [email protected] or [email protected].

How to sign up for Google Workspace

1. Start your application

First, head to sign in to Google for Nonprofits and click on the "Get Started" button.

To start your application, you will need:

• Your organization's tax ID number (BN in Canada, EIN in the US)
• Legal name of your organization

2. Verify with Goodstack

Google uses Goodstack to verify your nonprofit status. They check several things, including:

• Whether your organization is officially recognized by local regulatory bodies.
• Your nonprofit operates for public benefit and is compliant with local regulations.
• They also confirm that the individual applying on behalf of the nonprofit is authorized to do so.

Goodstack may request additional documents if your organization isn’t automatically recognized through their systems. These can include government-issued registration certificates or tax exemption letters. Once your nonprofit's status is confirmed, Goodstack forwards the verification to Google​.

3. Activate products

Once verified, you'll be able to activate Google products like Gmail, YouTube, Ad Grants, and more.

4. Set up your domain to work with Google Workspace

This part requires a bit of technical knowledge. For Google Workspace to be activated, you’ll need to do two things:

1. Verify your domain.
   Google will guide you through this part. You can verify by uploading a file to your website’s server, adding a DNS record to your domain’s settings, or adding a meta tag to your website.
2. Edit your domain’s DNS records to allow Google to use it.
   To enable Google to handle your email, you need to add certain DNS records to your domain settings. Editing DNS records can be confusing if you don’t work with domain registrars often, so make sure to get help if you're unsure. You definitely don’t want to cause an issue for your website by accident.

And then enjoy the world of stress-free, orderly communication!

With your domain verified and configured, you’re all set! Now you can head to admin.google.com/yourdomain and create all the accounts you need.

Say goodbye to the days of inconsistent email contacts, and hello to a new era of efficient, organized communication! If you need help getting set up, feel free to reach out—helping nonprofits succeed is my favorite thing to do.