Google Workspace for Nonprofits - Setting up your Account

This article is part two in a two part series on migrating your email hosting to Google Workspace for Nonprofits. The full series includes:

a) Get Verified with TechSoup and Google
b) Set up your account (current)

Your next steps are as follows:

1) Set up and verify your domain name (i.e. myparish.com)

You'll want to follow these instructions: https://support.google.com/a/answer/60216?hl=en#zippy=

You can safely add the domain without it affecting your current email accounts. It won't be until a later step (#3) when your email will start routing to the Google servers.

Some of the steps instruct you to make changes to your domain host. You actually need to make these changes to your DNS host. Some times your DNS host and Domain host are the same, but some times they are different. If you are not sure what your DNS host is, please contact Internet Ministries immediately, and we will help you with this step. 

2) Add users 

For the email accounts, you'll want to decide what kind of accounts to set up - full users, aliases, groups, or forwarding-only accounts: 

Add a user: https://support.google.com/a/answer/33310?hl=en
Add an alias: https://support.google.com/a/answer/33327?hl=en
Add a group: https://support.google.com/a/answer/33343
Set up a forwarding account: https://support.google.com/a/answer/2707558?hl=en

Once your users are set up in Google Workspace, and then you'll be ready for the next step.

3) Update the MX Routing Records

Next, you will change the routing records so that email starts flowing to Google Workspace. Once again, contact us if you are not sure how to make the DNS changes for your account.

4) Optional: Migrate your Saved Messages to the New Accounts

Next, you will use Google's Migration tool to migrate all of the saved email from your old accounts into the new ones. Here are instructions that we wrote:

https://support.goarch.org/-/google-gsuite-data-migration

and here are instructions from Google:

https://support.google.com/a/answer/9476255?hl=en 

After the migration is completed, we'll confirm for you that everything is as you expect it to be, and we'll shut down the old accounts.