What can Google Apps do for my non profit?

Google Apps is a service offered by Google to provide certain services that might ordinarily be found on local, intranet servers.

They offer the standard level service, which is available for free, to anyone with a small business, project, club, you name it. for up to 200 user accounts and more can be requested.

What do you and your 200 users get for free?

First let me say you should pony up the 10 dollars for a domain name to get the most bang for your buck. ( considering the cost for the domain name is your only cost at this level, you will likely find you get a lot of bang here.)

With a domain name and MX records properly pointed, your users get email accts @yourdomain.any.

You have access to a control panel as the admin that allows you full control over the start page, which can even be modified to show your groups name instead of "Google" at the top.

You can create web sites for depts or sub teams to present their work on.

Shared calendars and instant messaging are yours also.

All of these accessible only to your users and free. True, there are file size and storage limits per user, but those are adequate as is and if monitored, can be managed easily.

Each of your users has total access to Google docs, the online word processor, spreadsheets, presentations etc.. Your users can log in any time, anywhere and access their docs and print them locally as well as upload and convert from and to several doc types.

At the "premium" service level, You get more control over integration into existing services and your other existing local servers, etc.. as well as increased storage and capacity sizes.

However, for Premium service, there is a cost for the expanded control and capacity of $50.00 per user, per year. If you were to relate that to running your own servers, paying for your own equipment, techs, software ( unless you use OpenSource) and even then...) it can still be quite a but less cost to use Google's services.

For nonprofit organizations and schools however, Google has done something interesting. They have waived the fees related to Premium service and provide all said capacity and control ( with some minor differences).

So, if you take a very small non profit school with literally NO IT budget, this can be quite a jumpstart for your staff and students to enter the IT services based world and make things available to them they would otherwise not have.

Our school for example, has a website for a home page.

There are several smaller sites for each classroom to provide information to parents and students.

They have the shared calendars, instant messaging and email for staff to communicate and even higher classes students to have accounts with.

Start pages for students to login to at each classroom computer that is customized for a students interaction with the web.

Of course, they have access to the Google docs apps, allowing the student to write their homework online and store it there, then go home and continue to work on it there without ever having to worry about the dog eating it or their little brother or sister losing the homework.

All of those services cost the school a total of $10, which is for the domain name anyway.

Even the admin and tech work doesn't cost because it is provided for free as well ( call it a continued donation on behalf of the kids).

Will Google Apps be the right set of tools and services for every school or organization? Of course not.

There are going to be issues of security for many folks, you don't want to have company or govt secrets being typed up on Google docs for example but then again, in our example, this is a school, papers about Newton and the apple and geometry assignments are hardly national security interests.
Every group has needs and expectations that have to be met in their own right. It is a worthy option though.

Also, this is only one aspect of the steps the school is taking to improve technology access to staff and students.

The money saved on the the "intranet" type services though, allows the school to spend money on other equipment and software that cannot be gotten quite so handily from a Google Apps.

All in all, I have to commend Google on the set of services they provide to schools and non-profits in the Google Apps Education services. Whatever the motivations, be they sincerely offered to help the community or another way of advertising, it has helped this one school tremendously.