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Tiff Parker is an expert in Google Workspace support, having used Google Workspace herself throughout her career and developing a practice as an in-house expert to our clients who use Google Workspace. Carolyn asked Tiff for her Google tips for nonprofits on features to use and things to know about Google Workspace at the office.
Thank you, Tiff, for these useful Google tips for nonprofits!
If you have more Google Workspace questions, or have a great tip to share, get in touch!
Tiff Parker joined Community IT Innovators as an IT Business Manager (ITBM) in October 2023. She brings over 17 years of experience working in nonprofit technology.
As an ITBM, she guides clients through implementation of effective technology investments and utilizing efficient IT services in direct support of their missions. She also assists clients with long-term planning, budgeting, and strategic goals.
The Community IT ITBM service provides an outsourced IT manager to clients at a reduced cost to hiring and having an IT manager on staff. These managers are a resource dedicated to matching technology solutions to clients’ business needs. To do this well requires an ongoing conversation with the client to continually understand their business needs, and then effective communication with client staff and leadership about the ways specific technology solutions can meet those business needs and how to budget for technology.
The ITBM makes recommendations on IT investments, training programs, maintenance, and licenses. They help the client be forward-looking, and act as a vendor-agnostic, trusted advisor with deep knowledge of the nonprofit IT software and platforms available. Because Community IT works in partnership with clients to manage long-term IT needs, the ITBM relationship with the client makes them a true asset.
Prior to coming to Community IT, Tiff was the IT Director for an environmental nonprofit where she was responsible for the overall vision, planning, implementation, management and support of their various information systems, data, policies, and processes. Tiff graduated from Virginia Tech in 2007. She holds the Microsoft 365 Fundamentals MS 900 certification.
Carolyn Woodard: Welcome everyone to the Community IT Innovators Podcast. My name is Carolyn Woodard, and I’m the host and the Outreach Director for Community IT. And today, I am so excited to welcome, new to the podcast, my friend Tiff Parker, who also works with Community IT.
Tiff, would you like to introduce yourself?
Tiff Parker: Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me here. My name is Tiff Parker.
I’m an IT Business Manager with Community IT. I help clients with their strategic use of technology. I’ve got some experience in prior roles managing Google Workspace environments, and I also help out clients that have Google Workspace in their environments as well.
Carolyn Woodard: Great. So today, we’re going to talk about Google and get some tips from you. It’s so easy to start in Google Workspace. You can set it up yourself. You can administer it yourself. A lot of nonprofits are using Google Workspace.
But I think to outsourced IT providers, it’s not as common. We have a bunch of experts on our staff who can help with Google Workspace, like yourself.
And so I wanted to ask you, one of the things that we hear a lot of questions about is that Google Workspace has two ways to save your files.
What’s the difference, and what should you be using to share your files, and why?
Tiff Parker: In Google Workspace, every individual user account has what’s called My Drive. If you create any sort of spreadsheets, Google Docs, et cetera, those by default get saved into My Drive. From there, you can go ahead and share that with other users, share it externally, et cetera, depending on your settings.
But ultimately, those files are attached to your individual user account. So if somebody were to depart the organization, it becomes a little bit like, oh, where did that file go? What do we do with that?
So Google has introduced this other thing called Shared Drives, and that is more owned by the organization as a whole. So you can create a Shared Drive, you can add different people as members to the drive. And instead of saving your stuff in My Drive, you can save it in the Shared Drive.
It’s really great if you’re working and collaborating on things like projects, things that might go on for a couple of years or need to go beyond just that individual user account. Setting up Shared Drives is really great. It helps with off-boarding and transferring information. It creates this central repository for the organization for all those files.
Carolyn Woodard: Is it hard to set up the Shared Drive?
Tiff Parker: No, setting up Shared Drives is actually pretty easy. So you go into the Administrator Panel, and then from there, there will be a section to create Shared Drives and manage the members of them.
And then there’s also different permission settings that you can enable for your organization. Do you want only IT Administrator or the administrators to be able to create Shared Drives, or do you want anybody to be able to create a Shared Drive? And so, just kind of taking a little bit of time to think about what you want that architecture of that Shared Drive to look like, you know, will definitely go a long way.
Carolyn Woodard: And so, how would you learn how to set up the Shared Drive if you’re not super technically oriented? Can you just Google it? Is there a legitimate place that you look on Google to find the instructions?
Tiff Parker: Google has some really great resources available in their documentation. They have really great step-by-step instructions that walk you through how to create those shared drives, how to manage some of the permissions on them as well, and how to assign members.
Carolyn Woodard: Right. That’s good to know. We will include those links in the transcript.
How to manage Google Shared Drives.
We have some other questions about Google Workspace.
For example, we usually recommend that accounts always have multi-factor authentication on them for security, and that’s where you enter your password. But then there’s another step where maybe it gives you a message on your phone. There’s a code from your phone you have to put in before you’re able to fully access what you’re getting into, logging into.
So Google calls it something different, but is it the same?
Tiff Parker: So yeah, in Google, they refer to it as 2SV or two-step verification. And so that’s another one of those important security measures that we recommend everyone implement for keeping their online accounts secure. It’s more or less the same thing as MFA or multi-factor authentication, something you know and something that you have.
Improve Your Nonprofit’s Security with Google 2SV
Carolyn Woodard: And you can set that up with the Google Authenticator or other authenticators, but we recommend having it on every login. So if you have an account, you should have some kind of second-step authentication on that account. Is that correct?
Tiff Parker: Yeah, absolutely. because compromised accounts are one of the largest vectors we’ve seen for cybersecurity incidents. So it’s an important step that you can take to lock in your front door, you know. And so we strongly recommend everybody enroll that.
Carolyn Woodard: And I think one of the philosophical differences between Microsoft and Google is that because Google lets you do so much on your own, even if you don’t have a lot of technical skills, you may not remember to require that for everyone in your organization. And so making sure that somebody is owning your Google workspace and doing the cybersecurity that you need is really important.
Tiff Parker: And what we’ve found to enrolling out a two-step verification is we will have the users enroll them themselves. And once everybody is enrolled, then we can turn on enforcement for the entire organization. And then if you hire somebody later down the line, for example, as a part of their onboarding, they’ll be prompted to set up that two-step verification during that onboarding process.
Carolyn Woodard: That’s so clever. That’s a really good idea.
On to some more tips. I have heard about this, but I have never actually used Google Groups. And I believe that’s something in Google Workspace that you can set up.
So can you talk a little bit more about what it is and how people are using it at their nonprofits?
Tiff Parker: Many nonprofits have public facing email addresses like donations (at) yourdomain.org or info (at) yourdomain.org. And those emails have to go somewhere. Sometimes you can set them up as a user account.
However, if you’re on a paid Google Workspace plan, then that will cost money. But there’s also this other feature called Google Groups, which is free. It comes included as a part of your Google Workspace subscription. And you can create these groups there.
Say you have a couple of people in your development department that want to be receiving these donations notifications. You can create a Google Group for donations at yourdomain.org and have multiple people be members of that. And then that way, if somebody were to email it or get a notification, all of the members of that group will receive it.
And there’s a whole bunch of other features that you can do with that as well. You can use it as kind of like an internal listserv.
You can also use it for even kind of like a community organizing as well, kind of like emailing large groups of people. So that way it doesn’t get caught in people’s spam filters and whatnot. And the nice thing about that, like I mentioned, is that, number one, it’s free. You don’t have to pay for a user license for that.
The second thing is that there are security features as well. So if you have an individual, if you set up those e-mail addresses like it’s an individual user account, you can’t really set up two-factor, two-step verification on it because multiple people need to be able to access it. So it kind of leaves a little bit of a security risk there. But by using Google Groups, you don’t really have that problem. All of those things can be delivered directly to the individual’s inboxes.
Carolyn Woodard: Wow, that sounds so useful. Do clients use that, for example, for a volunteer group or committees?
Tiff Parker: Yep, absolutely. So if you wanted to have one with your board, you can do board (at) your domain.org and then add all of your board members as members to that group. And it’s just one easy way for people to be able to communicate with each other.
The other thing that’s helpful about using Google Groups too is because if you decide to purchase additional services like cloud backups, advanced email security, etc., then you don’t have to pay for that additional license on there too. It helps with license management and cost management in the long term.
Carolyn Woodard: That’s great advice for nonprofits because they’re always looking for ways that they can do more with less.
I know you had one more thing you were going to tell us about. That’s another useful little tip for using Google Calendar.
Tiff Parker: Yeah, a lot of times those that still have like brick and mortar, like office locations, you might have conference rooms in there. You might also have other resources that people share, like outreach equipment, projectors, maybe iPads or mobile hotspots or something.
Google Calendar has this ability to set up resources that people can check out through Google Calendar.
So if I need to use that conference room, when I’m creating my Google Calendar invite, there’s a little tab that says rooms, etc. You can click on that and then you’ll be able to see all of the different resources that are available during that time slot. So it’s pretty helpful if you’re all coordinating and sharing things.
Carolyn Woodard: I know a lot of organizations do still have an office, but it’s really, really hybrid. So some people are in the office some days, one day a week or one day a month. Some of the organizations that I’m thinking about, they don’t have an office anymore that’s big enough for all of them. So coordinating those who’s using which desk when, that might be something that you could do through Google Calendar.
Tiff Parker: Yeah, absolutely.
Carolyn Woodard: If you’re using Google Workspace already, then the calendar feature is right there, and that’s a feature of something you’re already using. So that’s always good for nonprofits to look out for.
Well, thank you so much, Tiff. These were all great tips for us to use Google better at our nonprofits. I want to thank you so much for your time today. This was just really, really helpful.
Tiff Parker: Absolutely. Thanks for having me.
Community IT has been serving nonprofits exclusively for twenty years. We offer Managed IT support services for nonprofits that want to outsource all or part of their IT support and hosted services. For a fixed monthly fee, we provide unlimited remote and on-site help desk support, proactive network management, and ongoing IT planning from a dedicated team of experts in nonprofit-focused IT. And our clients benefit from our IT Business Managers team who will work with you to plan your IT investments and technology roadmap if you don’t have an in-house IT Director.
We constantly research and evaluate new technology to ensure that you get cutting-edge solutions that are tailored to your organization, using standard industry tech tools that don’t lock you into a single vendor or consultant. And we don’t treat any aspect of nonprofit IT as if it is too complicated for you to understand.
Many outsourced IT providers simply won’t support the Google Workspace environment. Because so many nonprofits use Google Workspace when they start up, Community IT has a robust practice of support for Google Workspace when your nonprofit gets big enough to need help.
We think your IT vendor should be able to explain everything without jargon or lingo. If you can’t understand your IT management strategy to your own satisfaction, keep asking your questions until you find an outsourced IT provider who will partner with you for well-managed IT.
If you’re ready to gain peace of mind about your IT support, let’s talk.
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CTO Matthew Eshleman presents the release of our newly updated Playbook on Cybersecurity Readiness for Nonprofits download.
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