If your organization uses Google Workspace you have access to Google Groups. Kind of like a listserv but so much better.

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What are Google Groups?

If your nonprofit uses Google Workspace, you can use Google Groups to manage tasks via an email group, with granular controls and monitoring if you need it. Google Groups can improve security for email addresses like “donate@mynonprofit” or “info@mynonprofit” if that email directs to a group and is not its own account that’s credentials could be hacked.

Director of IT Consulting Steve Longenecker explains the ins and outs of using Google Groups and some issues to consider including Google’s Fedramp certification if you are trying to use Google Groups with federal workers.

Since few MSPs can help nonprofits using Google Workspace, please contact us if you have more questions we can help with. We know that so many nonprofit startups start using Google Workspace. We can help you stay with Google Workspace as you grow.

Some Key Takeaways:

Google Groups is a tool you should consider if you are struggling to manage a team or volunteer group. It is easy to get started and easy to expand as you learn the capabilities.

We know that few MSPs serving nonprofits are experts in Google Workspace. Community IT has developed expertise in Google Workspace support since we serve nonprofits exclusively, and so many nonprofits use this platform. If you are worried you are outgrowing Google Workspace as your nonprofit has grown, let’s have a conversation and help you do an assessment of keeping Google, moving to Microsoft, or managing a hybrid of the two. We have clients who have been there and we will help you find the best solution for your organization.

Presenters

Portrait of Steve Longenecker posing against a neutral background


As Director of IT Consulting, Steve Longenecker divides his time at Community IT primarily between managing the company’s Projects Team and consulting with clients on IT planning. Steve brings a deep background in IT support and strategic IT management experience to his work with clients. His thoughtful and empathetic demeanor helps non-technical nonprofit leaders manage their IT projects and understand the Community IT partnership approach.

Steve also specializes in Information Architecture and migrations, implementations, file-sharing platforms, collaboration tools, and Google Workspace support. His knowledge of nonprofit budgeting and management styles make him an invaluable partner in technology projects. He has developed expertise in supporting Google Workspace and using Google Groups.

Steve is MCSE certified. He has a B.A. in Biology from Earlham College in Richmond, IN and a Masters in the Art of Teaching from Tufts University in Massachusetts.



Carolyn Woodard


Carolyn Woodard is currently head of Marketing and Outreach at Community IT Innovators. She has served many roles at Community IT, from client to project manager to marketing. With over twenty years of experience in the nonprofit world, including as a nonprofit technology project manager and Director of IT at both large and small organizations, Carolyn knows the frustrations and delights of working with technology professionals, accidental techies, executives, and staff to deliver your organization’s mission and keep your IT infrastructure operating. She has a master’s degree in Nonprofit Management from Johns Hopkins University and received her undergraduate degree in English Literature from Williams College.

She was happy to have this podcast conversation with Steve Longenecker about using Google Groups.




Ready to get strategic about your IT?

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. When you are worried about your email safety and phishing attempts, you shouldn’t have to worry about understanding your provider.

If you have questions about using Google Groups you can contact us here.

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.

Transcript

Carolyn Woodard: Welcome everyone to the Community IT Innovators Technology Topics Podcast. I’m Carolyn Woodard, and the host, and today I’m here with Steve Longenecker, who is our Director of IT Consulting. Steve, would you like to introduce yourself?

Steve Longenecker: Sure. I’ve been at Community IT for 20 years. I know that because my son is 20 years old, and I started right a month after he was born. I’ve been helping clients with all manner of IT for a long time now.

Carolyn Woodard: You wanted to talk about Google Groups?

Steve Longenecker: One of the things that I do enjoy talking about is Google Groups because it’s a unique bit of functionality that Google offers that there’s not really any parallel for in the Microsoft 365 world. It’s worth talking about, I think, because it’s interesting. 

We actually have one client that’s exploring it. They’re a Microsoft 365 client, but they’re exploring, well, they’ve stood up a Google workspace expressly for this purpose. They’re not using it yet, but they’re piloting it, playing with it a little bit, and they’re interested in using it because it’s pretty cool what it can do. They’re running into trouble because a lot of the clients that this nonprofit works with are stakeholders from government. And the government has, sometimes they have their own regulations about you need to be certified a certain way. And actually, Google Groups for Business is certified to the standards that their clients need, but relatively recently. I don’t know when Google did it, maybe in the last year or two. And so, you know how the government can still have it in their minds.

Carolyn Woodard: They still can’t use this. 

Steve Longenecker: Yeah. So that’s the hold up for this client, because otherwise they’re really pleased with what it can do. 

I’ll try to tell you what it does, how it works.

What is Google Groups?

Carolyn Woodard: Well, can I take just a step back and say, I have a Gmail account, but I do not work for a company that is using Google Workspace. 

What you’re talking about with Google Groups is if your business, your nonprofit, your company is using Google Workspace, and you have your email through that, it’s not a Gmail account, it’s your company account. But through using Google Workspace, you can set up something called Google Groups. Do I have that correctly?

Steve Longenecker: That’s right. Yeah. All manner of people have probably been using Google Groups. I use Google Groups in my personal life to organize. Well, I’m not in charge of the groups, but I participate in a number of groups that are around organizing and picking up sporting things. I subscribe to this group, emails go out, are we going to play this week? Are we not going to play this week? 

It’s basically an email list, and Google has made that available, just like they have Gmail, more or less quote unquote for free. They sell advertising along with it or whatever. It’s the deal that we make. 

Google Groups for Business is part of the suite of services that the Google Workspace has, where nonprofits that have their email in Gmail or Google, and they have a domain name. It’s not at gmail.com. It’s at nonprofit.org. And they may have their files in Google Drive, and they may be using Google Voice. But they can pick and choose. They don’t have to use all of the suite of services to still be in Google Workspace. They can just use the email if they want. 

One of the options, one of the things that’s in there is this Google Groups for Business.

It would be branded with their email address, their domain name. And because it’s part of the Google Workspace thing, it wouldn’t be inundated with ads. You know, Google may, I don’t know actually out of the top of my head whether Google says that they aren’t even collecting any data. But if they do, it would be very aggregated and anonymized and all of that. But they’re definitely not selling advertising against it. It’s a service, and it comes across as a fairly professional service.

Anybody that is an IT person can tell that it’s coming through a Google server. But not any more than [a professional IT person could tell] your mail might be coming from a Google server if you’re using a Google workspace as a nonprofit. 

So, it’s very cool, yeah, and it does things a little differently than an email.

The History of Listservs Leading to Google Groups Functionality

And I was thinking about telling you a brief history of how this sort of evolved, if you don’t mind. 

Carolyn Woodard: Sure, I’d love it. Sure.

Steve Longenecker: In the beginning there was one kind of mailbox, a user mailbox. There might be George at nonprofit.org, and there might be Edwina at nonprofit.org, Kim at nonprofit.org. And very quickly it became useful to have distribution lists where you might e-mail to “donations at nonprofit.org.”

And then instead of that going to a mailbox, it would go into the mail server that would then send a copy to George and Kim at Edwina, the three people responsible for collecting donations. 

But those emails didn’t live anywhere except in their individual mailboxes, right? It hit that server and got copied to the three members of the list.

At some point, some people probably thought on the customer side, we’d like to have a permanent record of these emails in one place. So, let’s create a user account called donations.

But it’s a user account. And then we’re just going to let George and Edwina and Kim share the password, and they can log in to donations whenever they want to, read the emails, deal with the emails, and so forth. That’s not very secure, and that’s one of the major problems at this point with that kind of approach, what we call a shared user account.

More Secure Lists and Mailboxes

Both Microsoft and Google have avoided that or found a way around that security problem by having, in Microsoft’s case, it’s called a shared mailbox. There’s no credentials for it, right? You don’t log in to that mailbox at all. You log in as George, and then as George, you’ve used George’s credentials, you can access this shared mailbox, but you can’t get to it unless you’ve logged in as a user, George, Kim, or Edwina. 

On the Google side, they call it Google Groups, and so there might be a group called donations or donate at nonprofit.org. And so you log in as George, or you log in as Kim, or you log in as Edwina, and then you can go to groups.google.com, and you see all the groups that you’re a member of, and you might be a member of, donate, you click on that, and then you can see all the emails that’s come into that email address. 

Or you can have the email actually forwarded to your inbox if you want so that you don’t have to go to that place. You can just see them come directly in, but they’re coming in through that address. 

So up to that point in the description, there’s pretty much good parity between Microsoft’s world and Google’s world. 

Google Groups’ Unique Features

Where Google Groups is really cool, in my opinion, is that they have a lot more control. They provide a lot more control over the settings and configurations that you can put on this. 

They have three roles, owner, manager, and member. I kind of put owner and manager together. I mean, they’re not the same. There are distinctions, but for explanation’s sake, it’s simpler to think of them as two. 

You could, for example, have a list, a Google Group, where you say only owners and managers can post to this group, and members can read the posts, but the members can’t post to it themselves.

And that generates something that most nonprofits don’t need because they’re already getting it from MailChimp or SendGrid, or name your marketing tool, because we all have, most nonprofits have a marketing platform where they send out these mail blasts to all their lists, whether it’s fundraising or alerting people to important topical events that need a response or whatever. So that one’s not like a game changer, but it’s cool that you can do it. 

The way a donate Google group would work is you say that only owners and managers and members can read the posts, but anyone can post to it, and post means just sending an email to that address.

So anyone in the world can send an email to donate at nonprofit.org, but the only people that can read the emails are the members of the list, and the only members of the list are the three staff people at the nonprofit who are responsible for fielding all of these emails that get sent to that address, saying, “I’d love to donate to your organization. I hear such great things. Tell me how I can donate.” And then they would respond and say, “that’s so great that you’re interested. How much?”  So that is still a traditional list, a shared mailbox works for that in Microsoft 365, or even a distribution list works for that.

It’s the in-between that gets really cool.

You could have a Google group where members can post. Owners and managers get to decide who the members are. 

You could say that the postings don’t become public until an owner or a manager vets the posting, moderates the posting, that there’s a trigger that happens. But then what you end up with again is like a listserv.

The thing that I imagine this being really powerful for a nonprofit is not where you’re sending out one to many mail blasts like MailChimp, and not where you’re having many, many, many all over the Internet sending into a small group that are fielding donations and opportunities. 

But something in between where maybe the nonprofit has 200 academics across the country. They don’t use the email address of the nonprofit. They work for universities. But they’re experts in whatever that issue that that nonprofit is covering. They’re experts on hunger. They’re experts on Middle East peace or whatever. And they have signed up to be subject matter experts and to help this nonprofit with whatever the things are. Maybe they’re crafting articles. Maybe all they’re doing is just reviewing pieces before they get published. But they’re trusted. But you want them to be able to talk to each other.

And you may not even in that case need to moderate them. They’re all professional people, and they can be trusted. But basically, then you say, okay, members can post.

The trick is that not anyone can be a member. And in fact, you know, you can’t even see this group. It’s invisible to the outside world. You need to be added by us to even know that it exists. But once you’ve been added to it, then you’re going to get emails from the group. Anybody in the group can email the group. And that might be perfect for that need. 

It traditionally was called a listserv, but there just aren’t that many listserv applications out there anymore. I don’t know why, partly because I think it’s the traditional listservs ran into the grounds, ran into some of the spam problems, they were abused.

Google Groups has sort of threaded the needle pretty well. And so, you have this opportunity for many people to communicate with each other through a group that they sign up for or are signed up for by someone in the organization. 

And there can be moderation. There doesn’t have to be moderation. The membership can be something that’s automated or the membership can be manually added by the owner or manager of the group. 

But that’s the thing that I think probably more nonprofits could possibly leverage for to advance whatever their mission is, this Google Group thing. And it only is in Google Groups. I mean, there are other platforms that do it. But Microsoft doesn’t really have, to my knowledge, anything that’s quite works that way.

Carolyn Woodard: That has the granular controls.

Steve Longenecker: Yeah. Yeah. I could set up a massive distribution list that would kind of work that way. But then there’s no control, it’s just getting copied out to many different places.

Carolyn Woodard: It’s hard to moderate. Yeah. Yeah.

Collaborative Inbox Features

I had a question about that. So, you are saying the email donate at nonprofit.org, and this may not be something that Google Groups can do, but it goes to the three people, but you only want one person responding, but you don’t know which one is going to be the first one to see it and be able to respond. Within Google Groups, can you control that as well?

For example, if George responds, nobody else has to. Or they can see that there has been a response, so it gives you that kind of control too?

Steve Longenecker: Yes. There is. That is a piece of functionality that Google added a few years ago, and it’s called a collaborative inbox feature.

And you turn that on, and then you actually can assign threads to each other or to yourself. 

It can be flagged, “I’ll take care of this one, you take care of that one” kind of a thing. 

If you work in the group, this takes some discipline because if you’re just responding to the email that comes to your own personal inbox because of membership, then it might not get seen.

But if in the group you’re responding, also the conversations are tracked there as well through the Google conversation view, it’s called. You can see what George, not only that George assigned this particular piece of email to himself, but also what his response was and then what the response of that was. You can follow the whole thing.

And it’s handy too, maybe Kim is the manager of the team and doesn’t actually do any of the actual work. That’s not the right way to say that, but Kim isn’t actually responding to the emails, but does want to have visibility into it, but doesn’t want to have to actually have the emails coming into her inbox at all.

Carolyn Woodard: It’s not her job to respond.

Steve Longenecker: It’s not her job to respond or even to know.

Carolyn Woodard: She supervises.

Steve Longenecker: But she does want to be able to, whenever she needs to, to go to the group in Google Groups and see what George and Edwina have been doing for the last week or two weeks or whatever, and she can just do that. 

She doesn’t have to get the emails herself, but she does know that they’re being assigned and taken care of by the people that she supervises. 

So yeah, that’s a handy feature for sure, that being able to assign things.

Alternatives Like Slack or Discord VS Email

Carolyn Woodard: It seems like it would be quite a time saver as well. I know a lot of times in organizations, there’s the initial question and the response, but then there could be just a lot of time spent trying to figure out, did somebody respond to this person who had this question? So being able to see it all there without having to repeat and follow up and check, etc. would be a real productivity gain. 

It seems like something that there are some other tools that do something similar, like Discord or Slack, where you could have a group that you’re all talking amongst yourself and sharing an article or sharing a task. But I feel, to me, one of the genius things about this is that I have worked with volunteer groups where, the time spent training people to be able to use Slack kind of defeats the purpose of using it to begin with.

And you have moderators who are helping the people with technical questions about Slack or just getting used to Slack, a tool like Slack. 

Using something that your volunteers or your staff are already used to, like email, at the end of the day, it’s email, right?

Steve Longenecker: Right. Yeah. No, you’re right.

Carolyn Woodard: It’s something that you could use right away and be really productive right away. You already have it. 

If you’re in Google Workspace, you already have access to that. Is that correct?

Steve Longenecker: Well, yes. If the nonprofit already has Google Workspace, right?

The people that are the members of the group don’t even need to have anything to do with Google. They just need to have a working email address to be able to interact with the group.

Carolyn Woodard: That’s great, because then it expands, as you were saying, with the experts example, they have a university email, but they’re on this email list and can see who’s responded and what’s going on.

Steve Longenecker: Right. You bringing up Discord and Slack is right on, because you’re right. I think in many ways that those platforms could supplant this and do it better. It’s just that you’re also right, that not everyone’s there yet, right?

I mean, e-mail is still, it’s what everybody can fall back to as the standard communication method for a computer.

Carolyn Woodard: Well, and I love your example of the subject matter experts. 

If you’re getting someone to volunteer their time to help you with this topic policy, you don’t want to also have to train them to use Slack. If they just respond to an email when they’re doing the rest of their emails, then that just makes it easier for them to be those kinds of volunteer experts.

Steve Longenecker: Yep. Yep. 

You can make rules about whether the posting comes from the group or comes from the person that’s participating in the group. Now, that obviously you can see that the dynamics vary. 

If you’re replying to a request for a donation or to give a donation, they want to donate. Maybe George and Kim want to respond as “donate,” because it could be that they might end up tag teaming sometimes, right? Maybe George is going to be out tomorrow. George responds today. George is out tomorrow. Kim can pick up the thread, and the whole time you’re just getting emails back from “donate.”

Carolyn Woodard: Yeah.

Steve Longenecker: I mean, it’s a little anonymous, but you know…

Carolyn Woodard: It sounds official.

Steve Longenecker: It’s fine. “Thanks for your interest.” And you can still maybe put your name at the bottom if you want to, but it’s clearly coming from this email address, donate, not coming from Kim or George or whatever. So, it also makes it feel like you’re still in the right place if you’re the sender.

Carolyn Woodard: That makes sense. 

Ease of Use: How Hard is it to Set Up Google Groups?

I have two more quick questions.

Steve Longenecker: Sure.

Carolyn Woodard: One is, how hard is this to set up? A lot of organizations that are using Google Workspace are using it because it’s very easy to get started and you don’t have a big technical background to set up emails in Google Workspace. 

So, at this level, is it something you can teach yourself? Do they have walkthrough tutorials? Is it difficult?

Steve Longenecker: It’s very easy to set up. It’s not harder to set up than a regular user. You just Google it and you can find very nice instructions. 

How to Change Over from an Existing Shared Mailbox

I think some of the challenges would be if you already have “info at,” for example, or “donate at” as user mailboxes and now you want to switch to using Google Groups because you’re thinking, “this is a great idea. I want to do this.”

Then there might be a challenge because you can’t give a group the same email address that a user mailbox already has. So, then you might need to rename the current user to be “old info” or something and right away create the new one. 

And then you have this question of like, well, what about all the historical email that’s in my user mailbox? Can I get that over to my Google Group so it’s all in one place? And the answer to that is yes, but that part’s not easy. That takes some back-end command line tools. We’ve done it many times. We do it for our clients that want to make this conversion because they get the security benefits of having it be groups rather than sharing passwords around, particularly when MFA is now like just required. And then how do you share MFA? Because it’s on your phone and you have to always call George and say, “hey, can you let me in?” You can’t do that. So we have people switching.

I would tell someone who’s like working at a nonprofit to just call the current info mailbox, call it old info, free up that name, create the Google group, call the new Google group info and live with the fact that the historical data is in the old mailbox for a while, and it becomes less and less important the further you get away from when you cut that over. 

But the groups are not hard to set up. There’s some, all those settings, all that granular control that you have, might feel a little bit daunting, but again, Google’s instructions are very clear, and a lot of the defaults work fine. And I think it’s pretty intuitive. It makes sense. 

“Do I want everyone on the internet to be able to post to this, or do I only want the people that are members to be able to post?” You know, it depends on what your use case is. But Google’s instructions explain all of that. 

Have a Prepend on the Subject Line to Help Identify Group Emails in Your Inbox

Some tips that Google gives, one of them that I think is pretty good, is that you can have all of the emails sent through the group, from and to the group, have like a little prepend on the subject line.

You might say that it will say, Nonprofit Subject Matter Experts, as a little prepend to whatever the subject line is. That’s kind of long. So that’s not good, my example is not a good example, it’s too long, but something shorter.

But the point is that when it comes into your inbox, you right away know that it’s from this group, because it has that little thing at the top that sort of gives it as a clue. And that’s helpful for people who are members of many groups.

Carolyn Woodard: Or get a lot of emails.

Steve Longenecker: Yeah, or get a lot of emails. In my personal life I’m a member of a number of these sports organizing pick-up games. And this one’s for Petworth, the neighborhood that I live in. This one’s for Bethesda, the neighborhood that I don’t live in, but I go to sometimes. I just right away can see when the email hits my inbox, which group it belongs to. So doing that is advised by Google, and I advise people listening to this to do that.

Third Party Backups Work Around

The last thing that’s a little bit of concern to us is that, and though Google has engineered this great solution that we like a lot and do think it’s wonderful, it is different than a user mailbox. 

If you have a third-party backup of all of your email and Google Drive files and all of that, which we do recommend to our customers and clients and recommend to the people who are listening to this podcast that you get that, there’s lots of different backup services. Google’s APIs don’t make it easy for those third party tools to get to the Google group emails, so they end up not being backed up.

So that potentially is a problem. What we have done as our work around, and we’ve seen, we stole this idea from one of those third-party backups that had a knowledge base article that they recommended. You have a user account called Google group member or something. A user account that you make a member of all of your groups. No one logs into that user account ever or anything. It’s just there.

And especially if each of your groups has that little prepend, so that all of the subject, all the emails come in with an identifier at the top, then that gets backed up, that mailbox gets backed up. And so in the event that your workspace gets destroyed or something terrible happens, whatever that disaster is, you wouldn’t be able to restore the Google groups perfectly, but you would at least have all of those emails because they would have had them forwarded into this user mailbox that would have been backed up, and you can sort them and filter them by those identifiers at the prepend. So that’s another little tip for people to consider.

Carolyn Woodard: So, it’s kind of like a little ghost member of every group. 

Steve Longenecker: Yes. It’s not doing anything.

Carolyn Woodard: It just hangs out.

Steve Longenecker: It just hangs out and collects the mail from all of them. 

Carolyn Woodard: Yeah. Oh, that’s a great idea.

Steve Longenecker: Yeah. I really wish Google had just made their API a little bit more flexible in that regard, but they didn’t or maybe there was some reason they couldn’t, but that’s been our work around. So, when we help our clients set up Google Groups, we do that. We set up this sort of ghost member. That’s a great way of saying it.

Carolyn Woodard: Well, one thing that is so lovely about Google is that they do walk you through instructions. It is geared toward people. 

Steve Longenecker: Yes, it is. The language of their instructions are very friendly, not friendly like, you know, pat you on the back friendly, but just like not too technical.

Carolyn Woodard: Accessible.

Steve Longenecker: Accessible is a better word than friendly. Yeah. I agree.

Carolyn Woodard: Yeah.

Now, if you’re already using Google Workspace and you want to explore this, you could set a small one up and just play around with it. 

Steve Longenecker: Yeah. 

Carolyn Woodard: And there’s lots of resources on Google for how to manage it.

Steve Longenecker: Yeah.

Security in Google Groups

Carolyn Woodard: So, my last question, you’ve talked about it a little bit so far, but the security of it. Are there any security concerns? It sounds like it actually solves some security problems.

Steve Longenecker: Well, it’s certainly better than having a user account, like “info at” or “donate at,” that you’re sharing around amongst members of your organization staff, because you shouldn’t be sharing passwords. And even if you’re sharing passwords, the MFA is the real challenge. So, you don’t have to do that.

You log in as you and then access the group through the groups, through your identity, and you’re a member of it. 

I think that in terms of getting into the group, it’s as secure as your user accounts are. So, if you have MFA, or I guess in Google’s parlance, it’s 2SV, but 2-step verification, you should be in pretty good shape.

I do think you can think of all those settings, those configurations that they allow, that provide security options. For example, do you want members of the group to be able to see the other members of the groups? Do you want to be able to list the members or not?

Maybe you do, maybe you don’t. I’m not saying you should never allow that because maybe you’re 200 subject matter experts. There’s a real value in them being able to see each other and know that they’re all members. “Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, my colleague from Nebraska State is also in this. Good, good, good, good. Because that person knows so much about this, too. I wouldn’t want them to not be on the list,” and they can just see that they are. 

But you might also have situations where you want that to be private. Maybe it’s a group that’s sharing about health concerns, and it’s important that people have a certain amount of privacy in that regard. So, you have that privacy set up. 

And then, in general, email is not a super-duper secure technology. It’s very old, and its protocols are dated in that respect. And so, you’re always going to be risking spam and phishing, and even abuse, someone sending vulgar or inflammatory messages through email, and there’s not a lot of protections for that. So, a certain amount of obscurity helps, if you have an email address that’s not published anywhere on the web, it shouldn’t be getting hit a ton.

But if you’re concerned about that, let’s say that your members are minors, okay, so you just maybe you should have moderation. And basically, it’s a lot of work, but maybe anything that’s sent to that doesn’t actually show up for the members until someone on your staff has read it and said, yep, this is fine, and let it through. Otherwise, what if one morning you wake up and all of these 16 and 17 year old kids that are members of your list are getting all these emails that are just totally inappropriate, and it’s got your domain name on them.

So those are things to consider. But that’s not a Google group thing. That’s just in general the world of email that we live in, and we have to take steps to be safe.

Carolyn Woodard: Well, how much are you going to moderate it? Yes. How involved are you going to be? How big is your group?

Steve Longenecker: That’s right.

Carolyn Woodard: Yeah. Can you kick people out of your group, if somebody gets fired from the university, and then you don’t want them in your expert group anymore?

Steve Longenecker: That’s right.

Carolyn Woodard: And definitely, I think we’ve said this in other podcasts or webinars, but you want to be careful if you have info at nonprofit.org or those types of generic emails that are easy for someone to guess, and try to also try to hack that account. So having that email go to a Google group would seem to be more secure than having it be its own mailbox. 

Steve Longenecker: Because there’s no credentials to take there. Yeah.

Conclusion – Using Google Groups

Carolyn Woodard: Well, this is all really helpful. Do you have any last words you want to leave us with about Google groups?

Steve Longenecker: I guess I would say that if you are excited about this and you try it out and it works and you get some traction with some of your stakeholders and any of your stakeholders are in the government and they put up a fuss, push, because I think it’s okay. Google has done the certification and it would really help all the rest of the nonprofits that work with government agencies to get government agencies over that hump of accepting that Google is a full-fledged, safe, professional service that can be trusted.

Carolyn Woodard: There are some really big organizations that use Google Workspace.

Steve Longenecker: Oh, sure. Yeah, I’m kind of surprised that…

Carolyn Woodard: They don’t use Microsoft. Yeah.

Steve Longenecker: Yeah.

Carolyn Woodard: So, so interesting. I think, you know, we’ve talked about this before, too, but because it started out as this consumer product, Gmail, right, it’s got a lot of pros to that, and that they’re very customer-oriented, but they have to overcome that idea that it’s this free, not as professional, you know, you can’t do as much product. Google really has just added so many features to it. It really is a professional platform that you can use as a very large organization, and certainly as a nonprofit of any size.

FedRAMP and Using Google Groups

Steve Longenecker: Yeah. I just Googled it. Google, thank you very much. And the certification that I’m thinking of is called FedRAMP. Fed, as in federal, obviously, and then RAMP, R-A-M-P. I’m not sure what that stands for.

They have done the FedRAMP authorization for Google Groups for Business. Not necessarily, there’s like high and medium. I’m not sure that you’re going to ever get Google Groups to be accepted if your stakeholders are all DOD.

But if you’re just working with Health and Human Services or whatever, they should be okay with it. But we’ve definitely experienced resistance. It’s kind of interesting. You know, it takes time. It takes time.

Carolyn Woodard: Yeah. That’s one thing just to leave people with is that so many nonprofits use Google Workspace and more and more are using Google Workspace. And there’s a lot of MSPs that won’t or can’t even help you with Google Workspace. Just put it in a little plug for us. You can get in touch with us, talk to Steve, talk to other people on our team about MSPs. We are an MSP that can support Google Workspace at nonprofits.

Steve Longenecker: Yeah, we do both. I mean, we do. I mean, the two big players obviously are Microsoft 365 and Google, at least if you start talking about email. And we do both. And like I said, I have a client that, once they get through this FedRAMP issue, which I think it will happen in the next year or so, they’re probably going to be straddling where they have their email is going to remain in Microsoft 365. They’re going to use a separate domain name, but it’s still there. Clearly identified with them, it’s going to be.net instead of.org. But they’re going to use that for their Google Groups.

They’re pretty excited about it because right now they’re using this other list service that is actually a server. They need to maintain a server on-premises. It’s really old software. It’s really expensive. Every year, they have to spend all this money on renewing the support agreement. And they’re just like, well, Google Groups does all this basically for free, but we just got to get it rolling. So it’ll happen.

Carolyn Woodard: Amazing. That is a great way to think about Google Groups being able to add value to something that your nonprofit is doing or wants to do.

Steve Longenecker: Yeah.

Carolyn Woodard: Great. Well, thank you so much, Steve. I feel like I’ve learned so much about Google Groups today.

Steve Longenecker: Well, thanks for leading the conversation, Carolyn. Great talking to you.

Carolyn Woodard: It’s going to be great. Thank you.

Steve Longenecker: Okay. Thank you. All right.

Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash