By Josh McWilliam

We use Google Workspace to manage our email via the Google for Nonprofits program, which allows us access to all of the Google apps for free. We use the Groups functionality to manage our email distribution lists / aliases. This allows us to maintain consistent email addresses for people to use while having flexibility to control who those emails are delivered to.

Why We Use Google Workspace

Background

We used to rely on SOAR, the company that provided the Pack website, for a limited number of email aliases and for sending out email blasts. In 2023 the company’s technology crashed, leaving us with no website or email for months.

Alternatives Considered

Several solutions similar to SOAR were looked at, including:

TroopMaster (PackMaster) TroopWebHost ScoutBook

Several of the above seemed underpowered or undersupported.

TroopWebHost seemed to provide a well supported solution with featured that exceeded SOAR, however it does come with the downside of having to make an admin manage an entirely different roster in addition to the roster already managed in Scoutbook.

ScoutBook should be a viable solution and offers the benefit that it already has the full roster of scouts and leaders organized by Den and is something we have to maintain for Council’s purposes anyway. While this may change in the future, when this was considered in April 2023, ScoutBook suffered the following issues:

No ability to support external facing aliases (ie. cubmaster, treasurer, etc.) Limited ability to create simple sub-lists for easy sending to smaller groups (ie. dens). Requirement to use the app or website for sending messages. No ability to have lists including people beyond scouts / leaders registered in Scoutbook (ie. prospects, other interested parties, etc.) And the total dealbreaker, they have been having issues with their email domain being flagged by SPAM filters (Spamhaus) and thus their emails were not reliably getting through to people.

The above reasons drove us to consider an alternative.

The Benefits of Google Workspace / Gmail

We ultimately chose Google Workspace / Apps (Gmail) for the following reasons:

It supports all of the above features we might want that, as noted above, Scoutbook doesn’t support. Its powerful Group functionality allows us to support several email list use cases, including the ability to enable non-admins to send and to allow group owners/managers to manage their lists on a more granular level (rather than relying on a few admins to add or remove every single person). It offers actual email accounts (not just forwards/aliases) for instances where that is advantages (see section below for more about that). It is one of the most common solutions for businesses and nonprofits in the world. It is reliable and its commonality / wide adoption means that it will be around for a long time and that it will be easy to find people that know how to administer it (as opposed to some obscure / proprietary solution). It is a super powerful and flexible solution. Of particular note is the excellent SPAM filtering to ensure we are inundated with SPAM to our email lists. Mail sending will be from our own domain, which will be more professional but also not make us subject to the email domain sending scores of another domain that might get flagged in a SPAM list. We can also benefit from the broader suite of integrated GSuite tools.

Google Workspace does typically come with a cost. Even if we had to pay for a single user account (~$10 / month) it would be worth considering the above benefits (although not preferable). Fortunately, thanks to the work we did to get approved for TechSoup, we were able to get approved for Google for Nonprofits relatively easily, which allows us to use the full Suite of Google apps for free.

NOTE: There is one benefit that SOAR and solutions like TroopWebHost does support and that is the automated email blasts each week of upcoming activities. That was a valued feature, but the loss of that is outweighed by the many benefits above and there are alternative strategies to ensure upcoming events are well communicated. The more distributed management of the lists that Google empowers (ie. Den leaders able to manage their own list) and the ability to create lists beyond just current families (ie. prospects) alone create increased communication opportunities, even if those reminders need to be initiated by a person periodically (the new website being developed is also going to help).

Benefits of Actual User Accounts

Most people are likely to prefer having emails directed to them to simply be forwarded to their own personal email accounts. However, for some roles, a separate user account can offer the following advantages:

More authority / credibility when sending emails to people (will come from that email address). An easy way to keep Pack emails related to that role separate from personal emails. The ability to pass the login information to that account to the next person who assumes that role, which allows for increased continuity due to the ability for the new person to have access to past emails related to that role as a reference (so much information is sent via email that never makes it to the files archive). The ability for multiple people (ie. role + assistant) to use it as a joint inbox and collaboratively manage it. Having important 3rd party accounts (ie. Banks, DNS, etc.) linked to an actual email account that the organization owns, rather than a personal account (including personal account setup as Pack looking emails - ie. pack232money@gmail.com) is a much better practice when it comes to continuity and account recovery as leaders change. For roles likely to be uploading documents to the Google Drive file archive, doing so as an actual user account makes permission management easier, both in upload/edit rights but more importantly when it comes to file ownership. Files uploaded by someone’s personal account can create challenges down the road if that file needs to be edited and we then realize no one has edit access to it because the owner of the file was someone’s personal account.