Non Profit IT Department: Collaboration

Google Spreadsheets - A not for profit practical example

Tim Laughlin — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 13:46:00 GMT

Your the treasurer of a non profit organization and it's time to prepare the annual budget. In years past this has been a challenge. Your executive committee isn't the most technically savvy bunch.

A couple of them don't even have Microsoft Excel. Of course being a number crunchier, or at least playing one in your organization, you depend on a spreadsheet. You spend hours in Excel getting all your formula's right and balancing the income and expenses.

Now you are ready to share. So you email a copy to Exec members who have Excel. You PDF for those that don't. Off it goes and everyone has feedback. Your VP faxes back a print out of the PDF with her changes. By the way she can't add, but what is a zero or two between friends. The others edit your spreadsheet and send it back, of course one forget to attach it to the e-mail. Now how do you merge that all together make it work? More hours adding all the changes, just to send it out again.

Enter Google Spreadsheets; part of Google Docs. Which is included in Google Apps for Domains, have I mentioned I like Google Apps for Domains?

So here is what our budget looks like in Excel, you can download it if you would like.

Now we need to upload it to Google Docs. There quite few ways to do this, but for this demo we will use the Google Docs web interface. We open our web browser and go to Google Docs for our domain. For this demo I am using Google Docs associated with NonProfitITDept.com. So I navigated to http://docs.nonprofitITDept.com/. Obviously your URL will be different.

Then I simply login

Press upload from the menu bar.

And here is our spreadsheet ready to be shared and edited. The formatting was maintained, but more importantly so where all the formulas.

Now we click on the share tab and enter the email address of those we would like to share with.

There are many more features of this application that I have not covered. Hopefully this will get you started and can experiment with Google Spreadsheets.

Getting your non-profit setup with free e-mail

Tim Laughlin — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 19:41:51 GMT

As mentioned before Google Apps for Domains is a great solution for Non Profits that want to change or add e-mail to their domain. You will need two things to get started.

A registered domain name. If you don't have that already you will want to go to Register.com or Network Solutions and register a domain name. There are other domain registrants out there. Many are less expensive than the two I mentioned. However, in this case I feel you get what you pay for. In a year or two when you need to renew the lesser competitors may not be around, or have been sold. You then spend days trying to get access to the new system. I have seen a lot of issues, so please use one of the registrants I mentioned. That being said they are all gong to try and up sell you for web hosting, search engine placement, , etc. In my opinion none of these are worth obtaining. The only thing you want is to register the domain and have it's Domain Name Services (DNS) managed by the registrant you choose.
The Federal tax id number for you organization. If don't have one yet, start filing the paperwork, but you can still register with Google. The only downside is you will only be eligible the Standard Edition of Google Apps for Domains. Still worth doing. Once you do get your Federal Tax ID for you 501(c)3 you can fill out this form to upgrade your Standard Edition to the Educational Edition.

With that information we are ready to get started.

Go to the sign up form. In my opinion this form is a little confusing. The cause of the confusion is the new Team Edition of Google Apps. But here is magic combination. Choose the Administrators: I own or control this domain. I know scary, they assume you are an administrator of a system. Don't worry about that's what where here for, to help be an e-mail administrator. Now type in your domain name. If you just registered it and get the "This domain is not yet registered." error don't be concerned. It can take up to 24 hours for domain registration to be visible to the world. Just come back to this step at a later time
Pressing get started brings us to step 2. You just need to fill out your contact information.

For number of users this should be your leadership group rounded up to the next highest 10. So a board of 16 would probably want 20 users, may be 30. You can always request more later. Also don't be surprised if once you get thought the process that Google gives 200. The are not stingy with accounts, but be respectful and only request what is reasonable for you organization.
Email address needs to be your currently working e-mail address. I suggest you use one that is not within your domain name. A Gmail Account would a great choose.
Don't panic on the DNS editing checkbox. Google has great docs on how to do that. They have step by step instruction for Register.com and Network Solutions, we can worry about that later. Just take a breath and check the box.
On Type, obviously you want to check Non-Profit Organization.
Now you can choose Yes, please enter Federal Tax ID. If you don't have one, just choose the No, use Standard Edition.
Size of Organization, this one is a little unclear. In the past I put the number of current members including leadership.

You will then need to setup your admin account. I don't have a screen shot of the page, sorry.

Once you continue your account will be created and will be given a link to your Admin Dashboard. You will more than likely be given the Standard Edition. Once Google verifies your status as 501(c)3 they will upgrade you to the Educational Edition.

If you have existing e-mail accounts I would wait for the upgrade. The additional feature included will the E-Mail migration tool.

Google Apps for Domains - A great choice

Tim Laughlin — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 19:30:10 GMT

As this site grows you will see I have a great deal of respect for Google and their philanthropy. One great example Google has made their Google Apps for Education available for free to registered 501(c)3 organizations.

It is worth noting, that Google calls this service the Education Edition of Google Apps. Don't let the name confuse you. Educational Edition and the Not For Profit versions are one in the same. If your organization already has a domain registered this is still a great resource you can take advantage of for free.

The service that is most appealing, at least at first, is the e-mail application. Google's GMail system is a superior e-mail system. The spam filtering is second to none. The individual storage quota is currently over 6 Gig, which is a tremendous amount of space to store your emails. That quota is has been growing a regular basis.

There will be more posts on this site regarding using Google Apps for Domain and all the greats tools. But before you can do any of those great things you need to sign up. Once you are signed up you be given a standard account until you 510(c)3 status is verified. You will then be upgraded to the Educational version and the additional services like e-mail migration will be enabled. If you already have your own domain registered and e-mail accounts set up then I would suggest waiting until the Educational features are enabled before changing your DNS to route mail to Google. The e-mail migration tools are really pretty nice, so moving all the mail for your uses would be a greatly appreciated I am sure.

If you have any questions on signing up with Google Apps for Non Profits send me an email. I promise more to follow on this subject.