Team 2543, TitanBot, recently went through the process of getting Google Apps for our organization. It was a little difficult, but I'm hope our experience can help others looking to take advantage of these great tools.
Google has a service called Google Apps for Business that they offer Gmail and Google Drive along with a whole bunch of little tools that help businesses stay organized. Google offers the same service to nonprofits free of cost. The requirements are listed below.
- To be eligible for the Google for Nonprofits program, organizations must:
- Hold current 501(c)(3) status, as determined by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service; and
- Acknowledge and agree to the application's required certifications regarding nondiscrimination and donation receipt and use.
- Please note that the following organizations are not eligible for Google for Nonprofits:
- Governmental entities and organizations;
- Hospitals and health care organizations;
- Schools, childcare centers, academic institutions, and universities (philanthropic arms of educational organizations are eligible). To learn more about Google's programs for educational institutions, visit Google in Education.
- Google reserves the right to grant or deny an organization's application or participation at any time, for any reason, and to supplement or amend these eligibility guidelines at any time. Selections are made at Google's sole discretion, and are not subject to external review.
When you get approved, you qualify for various Google products that you can read up on here
http://www.google.com/nonprofits/products/
So our team applied at was quickly denied (within a few seconds). The reason being is our organizations classification for the IRS is a "Educational Institutions and Related Activities". Google automatically took this as being a school so we did not qualify for the program. It was an automated response. Google offers the Google Apps for Education, but you can't take advantage of the other services offered
here. We also aren't a school so we don't qualify. We took our chances and tried. The next day we got a response from a fellow at Google stating that we do not qualify because we did not meet this requirement "
K-12 or higher educational institution, non-profit, accredited by a generally accepted accreditation body" One thing different when we were rejected this time was that it was a personalized response. We decided to once again try our chances and explain the situation we were in because of the way the IRS classifies us. The nice guy at google understood our situation, asked for our EIN, and approved our Google Apps account. So we have a Google Apps for Education account now. Some notable things about this is that you get unlimited users and unlimited drive space. This has been a tremendous help to our team and we use Google drive for just about everything we make and every student has their own account. Where we would previously have binders full of documentation, we now have it all in the cloud and easily accessible.
I hope this can help some teams out there trying to take advantage of these resources. I would try for Google Apps for nonprofits first because it also opens the options to use the other services google offers for nonprofits.