Community IT Innovators Nonprofit Technology Topics

Microsoft Vs Google Workspace for Nonprofits pt 1

• Community IT Innovators • Season 6 • Episode 12

Share episode

Which platform would you choose if you were starting a brand new nonprofit tomorrow?

Learn the differences, how to choose, and when to contemplate changing platforms in this webinar with Community IT Innovators CEO Johan Hammerstrom and Director of IT Consulting Steve Longenecker. Johan and Steve together have over 40 years of experience in nonprofit IT and have worked with hundreds of nonprofit clients as they made crucial decisions about their IT platforms.

In part 1, we discuss the basic features of each platform, and acknowledging that most people working at nonprofits do not actually have a choice in platforms, we discuss the reasons one or the other may be a better fit for your organization if you had to choose. And if you are thinking of switching, we recommend you have a very strong business case for the switch, not just personal preferences, and that you practice very good change management if you find you must switch.

In part 2, we discuss security, data retention, and the limited options for nonprofits that are not one of these two platforms. That is, there are many reputable third party options for ID management or cloud storage, but very few other options for basics like email, calendar, or the office suite of documents and spreadsheets. We then take audience questions and delve into managing a hybrid solution (and check out the previous webinar Managing Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 Together for more tips.)


Microsoft VS Google Workspace

Every nonprofit organization must have IT tools and a platform. Google offers its Google Workspace suite at a discount to nonprofit organizations. Many new nonprofits use this suite of tools to start up their organization. For small, young, and growing nonprofit organizations, and nonprofits in the education field, this inexpensive suite of user-oriented essential IT tools is becoming a popular standard.

Of course, there’s a competing service provider also offering a suite of cloud-based basic business productivity tools, also at greatly reduced prices to qualified nonprofit organizations: Microsoft.


We are often asked to give our opinion over which platform our clients should use. The answer is not as simple as you might think.

As with all our webinars, this presentation is appropriate for an audience of varied IT experience.

Community IT is proudly vendor-agnostic and our webinars cover a range of topics and discussions. Webinars are never a sales pitch, always a way to share our knowledge with our community. That said, we’re obviously talking about two specific platforms in this presentation, Microsoft and Google – and we find that 99% of our clients are using one or the other, or a hybrid of both. Given that these platforms are widely used by nonprofits, it is in that context that we discuss the choices, advantages, and trade-offs that you could be facing as you choose a platform for your nonprofit.

Many questions asked at registration or live at the virtual event will be answered in the transcript. Check back after the webinar for additional resources.

_______________________________
Start a conversation :)

Thanks for listening.


Carolyn Woodard: Hello, and welcome to the Community IT Innovators Technology Topics Podcast. I'm Carolyn Woodard, your host, and today we're going to hear part one of a two-part series from our recent webinar on choosing Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace or a hybrid as a platform for your nonprofit IT. 

Welcome, everyone, to the Community IT Innovators webinar on Microsoft versus Google Workspace, Choosing the Right Platform. We're going to learn about the differences, how to choose, and when to contemplate changing platforms with our CEO, Johan Hammerstrom, and Director of IT Consulting, Steve Longenecker. Johan and Steve, together, have over 40 years of experience in nonprofit IT, and have worked with hundreds of nonprofit clients as they make crucial decisions about their IT platforms. 

My name is Carolyn Woodard. I'm the Outreach Director for Community IT. I'll be the moderator today. Johan, would you like to introduce yourself?

Johan Hammerstrom: Yeah, thank you, Carolyn. Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks again for joining us.

My name is Johan Hammerstrom. I'm the CEO at Community IT. As Carolyn mentioned, I’ve worked with hundreds of nonprofit organizations, helping them with all kinds of IT planning and operations management. And I'm really excited to be discussing this topic today. It's one that comes up a lot. We're looking forward to diving into it.

Carolyn Woodard: And Steve, would you introduce yourself?

Steve Longenecker: Sure. I'm Steve Longenecker, Director of IT Consulting at Community IT. I really enjoy talking to clients about both Google and Microsoft and helping them think about this very question that this webinar addresses. I'm looking forward to today's session.

Carolyn Woodard: And before we begin, if you're not familiar with Community IT already, a little bit about us. We are a 100% employee-owned managed services provider. We provide outsourced IT support, and we work exclusively with nonprofit organizations.

Our mission is to help nonprofits accomplish their missions through the effective use of technology. We are big fans of what well-managed IT can do for your nonprofit. We serve nonprofits across the United States. We've been doing this for over 20 years. We are technology experts and are consistently given an MSP 501 recognition for being a top MSP, which is an honor we received again in 2024. We host a weekly podcast and a monthly free webinar series.

You can access all of our previous webinar videos and transcripts on our website, communityit.com, and register for upcoming webinars there. 

I want to remind everyone that for these presentations, Community IT is vendor agnostic. We only make recommendations to our clients and only based on their specific business needs. We never try to get a client into a product because we get an incentive or a benefit from that.

But we do consider ourselves a best of breed IT provider. It's our job to know the landscape, the tools that are available, reputable, and widely used. And we make recommendations on that basis for our clients based on their business needs, their priorities, and their budget. 

We're obviously talking today about two specific platforms, Microsoft and Google, and we find that 99% of our clients are using one or the other or a hybrid of both. So given that these platforms are widely used by nonprofits, it's in that context that we're going to discuss the choices, advantages, and trade-offs that you could be facing as you choose a platform for your nonprofit.

And a little bit more about us, our mission is to create value for the nonprofit sector through well-managed IT. We also identify four key values as employee owners that define our company, trust, knowledge, service, and balance. We seek to always treat people with respect and fairness, to empower our staff, clients, and sector to understand and use technology effectively, to be helpful with our talents. And we recognize that the health of our communities is vital to our well-being, and that work is only a part of our lives. 

So now I'm going to go over our learning objectives for today. We hope that by the end of the session, you will learn the basics about Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace as popular nonprofit IT platforms. You’ll learn how to match your nonprofit business needs with the appropriate IT platform. We're going to talk a little bit about when it makes sense to switch and how you would go about making that decision. 

And then we're going to talk about the platform strengths and weaknesses: ease of use, the capabilities, storage, capacity, meeting and collaborating, AI tools, and managing cybersecurity. 

So now I'm going to launch our first poll. I know that many of you answered this question at registration, but we just wanted to get a feel for which platform are you using now. Your options are Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, we straddle both, or not applicable. For that “we straddle both” – if all of your staff are using something from each one, so you're really using both of them, choose that. If you have one person who's storing some things in Google Drive, but everyone else is in Microsoft, then go ahead and choose Microsoft as the primary one that you're using. But if you have a hybrid setup where you are using features of both, go ahead and put that in.

And Johan, can you see that?

Johan Hammerstrom: I can, yes. So about 21% of respondents said that they're using Microsoft 365. 27% Google Workspace and 48% using both. And those numbers are actually very similar, I guess not surprisingly, to the numbers that we saw from registrations.

Carolyn Woodard: All right, well, thank you, everyone. That's really helpful to know. At registration too, when people put in their questions, there was a question about how to manage both, and does it make sense if you're in both to try and get yourself over to one or the other. So, we're going to talk about that. 


Which Platform Would You Choose If You Were Starting a Nonprofit from Scratch Tomorrow?

We do have an audience question that, if you were starting a new nonprofit from scratch tomorrow, which platform would you pick and why? Johan and Steve, I know that you wanted to start answering this question.

Steve Longenecker: Yeah, I'll jump in. Thanks, Carolyn. I think it's a good question to start this webinar off with, because it speaks to the fact that that's not where most of us are.

Most of us are already at a nonprofit that's already using one or both or straddling both. It's interesting, that sometimes what we might start with, if we were starting from scratch, is not where we are. But that doesn't mean that we're going to switch tomorrow, because the costs of switching can be pretty dramatic sometimes. And Johan and I will talk about that more in the future of this webinar, I'm sure. 

I grew up in the Microsoft world as a technician. And so, I find that I have probably a little more expertise in Microsoft than Google, and that would influence my choice a little bit.  

But I think for me, the first question I would ask if I were starting a new nonprofit is what my nonprofit’s five-year plan looks like. Usually nonprofits, when they're starting, are very small. But if my plan is to grow a lot and get to some sort of scale, I think after you get to a certain scale, some of the advantages of Microsoft 365 become bigger. It's a platform that's built by a company that services a lot of enterprises and has got a lot of tools that benefit scale.  

The other thing I would ask is, where am I situated in terms of what I do as a nonprofit? If the stakeholders that are external to me, I'm going to be collaborating with our friends, for example, in schools, I think Google Workspace would be more compelling. A lot of schools use Google Workspace. If I was going to be interfacing with teachers or students, youth, I think Google Workspace would be, maybe I would choose that just for the value of that collaboration. 

In the same vein, if I was going to be working a great deal with government agencies, I might choose Microsoft 365. There's historically been a bit of an aversion to Google in the government. That's changing, but that historically was there. And I would think you'd still find, at least today, that there'd be times when you might have stakeholders in government agencies who tell you things like, oh, we're not really supposed to use Google Drive. It's frowned upon by our CISO, our Chief IT Security Officer. Johan, what do you think?

Johan Hammerstrom: Yeah, it's funny. We asked ourselves this question as we were preparing for the webinar. And I think we convinced ourselves of every option as we talked through the different scenarios.

Just one example that we came up with, the education example, is a really good one. If you're working in the educational space, you might be collaborating with people who are used to using Google. And so, you're better off using that because you're going to be spending a lot of time collaborating on a shared document in Google Docs. 

But for sure, your accounting team is going to want to use Microsoft Excel for their spreadsheets, because Google Sheets really lacks a lot of advanced, and even average functionality that Microsoft Excel has. So, we say, yeah, that's true. 

And then we say, however, Google Sheets actually does have a lot of support for scripting. And there's a lot of, you can do more integrated scripting, pulling data from different systems through an API, putting it in a Google Sheet, transforming it, and then pushing it out into another location. So, we'll say, well, maybe for that use case, Google would be better. 

So, we could come up with a lot of examples of why for particular needs, one was better than the other.

And I think that was the lesson learned for us just in that conversation was that there's no one size fits all answer.

And even within an organization, what you need now might be different from what you need. What are your growth plans?

Maybe if you were starting a five-person nonprofit, you just wanted to give everybody Macs and have them work in the browser in Google, that would probably be pretty easy to manage. 

But what if you're planning to grow to 25 or 30 people? Is that still manageable?

Well, maybe depending on what are your people going to be doing? Are you hiring a bunch of young people straight out of school that maybe most of their background is in Google? You want them to hit the ground running. So maybe Google is a better choice.  

Anyway, so that's what we're going to get into in this webinar. What are some of the relative strengths and weaknesses of each of the different platforms. But all of that, I think the big caveat is, it really depends on the needs that the organization has. 

And you all who are attending today, you understand what your organization's needs are. And hopefully, we can frame how these different systems work, and what their relative strengths and weaknesses are, in a way that you can connect the dots to the needs that you have.

Carolyn Woodard: Yeah, I love earlier you said, Johan, making sure that you can make a business case for either one of the platforms is important.


Basic Functionality of Both Platforms

I know that since most people are on one of these platforms, everyone will probably already know this, but just to make sure we set some baseline understanding, here are the basics of the two platforms we're talking about and that they have become standards in the nonprofit sector. I'm not sure who is going to take this. Steve, do you want to just kind of run through?

Steve Longenecker: Yeah, we'll go through it very quickly. Yeah, it looks like a lot of people are saying Microsoft 365, a lot of people are saying Google in the chat. It reflects the fact that each of those people probably has reasons for it, but it's not a slam dunk one direction or the other.

That while they're not identical and there are little bits and bobs in each of the stacks, I guess we call them, that we like a lot and wish there were true parity. There's not quite parity entirely across both. They're pretty similar and they both do the basics of running a non-profit good enough, well enough.

They both have good identity; identity meaning making sure that when you log on, you are who you say you are and that that's assured. Good identity, good email, good file storage, calendaring, collaboration tools and everything. In both cases, you get it all integrated in one stack.

If you get Google Workspace, your calendar and your email is the same system. An invitation comes to you in an email, you accept it in your email, but it shows up in your calendar automatically. Same thing with if you use Microsoft 365's Outlook and Exchange Online.

I did see in the chat about how Google is free for us. If you're less than 300 people, Microsoft is I think pretty much has some pretty good strong parity with Google for pricing. Google is essentially free at the charity level.

And the difference may be not to jump ahead to slides too much, but there's no cap on that as far as number of users, whereas Microsoft makes their basic tier free, but only up to 300 users. After that, you're paying a very small amount per month. So not free, but still, both of them are considerably cheaper than if you are doing this as a business or a commercial entity.


Nonprofit Licenses 

And in fact, we have a number of our 501c3 clients that are recently exploring the fact that they're feeling some pressure from their legal, from their council, to split off their 501c4 activities from their 501c3 activities. This is not a normal thing for all small nonprofits, but there are nonprofits that have a 501c4, which is more of an advocacy side. And those advocacy side of things generally don't get these discounts. The discounts are reserved for the 501c3s. These are IRS designations. Those of you who are not in under the IRS, the US. I saw someone from Canada, so it's different in Canada. 

But those people, those organizations are realizing, oh my gosh, if I do this the way our lawyers want us to, we're going to have to pay business rates. Oh my gosh, this is expensive. It's what businesses have been paying all along, so it's really nice (to keep getting the nonprofit discounts.) 

I would say in general, one of the reasons that once you're in one platform or the other, we often tell our clients not to switch unless there's a really compelling business case to do so, is because we do think that while there are pros and cons of each, which we'll talk about later, they both do a good enough job with the basics that you can work very well in either.


Storage Capacity Offered in Google Workspace

Johan Hammerstrom: Can I ask you a quick question, Steve? I know one of the big game changers in Google was the increase in the storage capacity that they offer in the nonprofit tier. Is that a point of difference between the two platforms?

Steve Longenecker: Yeah, if you're talking about what's free or really inexpensive to charities, that has been a game changer. If we had done a webinar on this topic two years ago, we would have told you that one of the real weaknesses of Google Workspace is that if you're at the charity level, you only get 30 gigabytes of storage per person, which is really not much in this day and age. That's just not very much at all.

And anybody who's been collecting email for 10 years at a nonprofit can get there just in their email, never mind their files. And they went from that being the limit, again, this is for charities. It's different if you're on the business plan or the business plus plan, but on the charity plan or the Google for Nonprofits plan, they went from that 30 gigabytes per person limit to 100 terabytes for the whole organization.

And without going into the math, it's orders of magnitude difference between those two things. Or maybe I'm exaggerating now, maybe just one order of magnitude, but it's a lot, it's a big difference. So now that's reversed.

And I would say that Google Workspace has a big advantage in terms of the total amount of storage that you get.

And we do see our clients running into that limit problem with Microsoft 365, in their file storage specifically in SharePoint. In Microsoft, you save your files to shared libraries called SharePoint libraries. And we do have we do have clients, particularly those who want to save everything and to save video files of meetings that they record or whatever, whatever their video files are, those fill up space quickly. 

If you have 100 terabytes of space, that's hard to fill up even with a lot of video files. I'm sure in five years we'll find, we'll say 100 terabytes is nothing, but right now it feels like a lot. I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if two years from now, that's no longer a differentiator, but right now that's a big change, that's a big difference.


Should You Consider Switching Between Platforms? 

Carolyn Woodard: Well, I feel like that's a great segue into this second audience question, which is when should you consider switching between Microsoft 365 or Google Workplace, or going to a hybrid solution mixing the best features of both? 

And we do have a question in the Q&A around our perspective on a hybrid environment, mostly Microsoft 365 with some teams in Google. 

Johan, would you like to talk a little bit more about how this question comes up that people feel that they want to switch?

Johan Hammerstrom: Yeah, at the risk of being a broken record, for us the decision to switch platforms really comes back to that business need. It's important to make a business case for making the switch, because a switch will be disruptive, it'll be expensive, it requires a lot of change management for the organization. It's important to understand the reasons behind switching platforms.

And I think from our perspective, it falls into three categories. 


Usability

And one is usability, which ends up being a personal thing. Some people are just more comfortable in one environment versus the other. And so that's one set of factors to consider, one set of criteria. 


Functionality

The second is functionality. And that can be difficult to assess because in many ways, these two platforms have very similar functionality. But as I illustrated with the Excel versus Google Sheets example earlier, there are subtle but often significant differences between how the different applications in Microsoft and Google work. Understanding those differences and how that difference in functionality matches up with organizational needs is an important thing to do if you're considering making the switch. 


Interoperability
 

And then the third category is interoperability, for lack of a better term. Who is your organization working with and collaborating with most of the time? And does that suggest which platform is better for you to be on? 

Because as we've used the education example many times, if you're collaborating with a lot of educators who are all in Google, trying to do that in Microsoft could end up being challenging.

Conversely, if you're working with a lot of people outside of your organization that are all in SharePoint, trying to access and share files out of Google is going to be difficult. 

Many times, that doesn't make a big difference. Obviously, at Community IT, we work with a lot of different organizations that use both systems and we find ways to make that work. And oftentimes, that's what you have to do. But I think those are the three sets of criteria that are important to consider when you're thinking about a switch between the two platforms.

Carolyn Woodard: It's interesting that in some of the registration questions, people said, we're switching right now to Microsoft, but I prefer Google, and also vice versa, like, oh, we have to switch to Google, but I really would rather stay in Microsoft. So that speaks a little bit to what you said that it's a big change, that you're asking everyone in your organization to go through. Making sure you manage that with change management, and really hearing from all the stakeholders, and making sure that people can do what they need to do is really important if you're thinking about it.

Steve Longenecker: If I could just editorialize on the usability point, that's the one that I counsel the clients that I talk to most strongly to really hesitate to switch is on usability.

Frequently that it comes up when someone new comes into a leadership position at a nonprofit who comes with a usability preference that doesn't match where the organization is at. So, a new executive director is hired. They really, really like Microsoft. They particularly really, really like Outlook. And they just don't feel like Gmail is professional and their calendars aren't quite right. They feel like there's too many invitations that don't take a little bit of extra massaging and just be easier if everybody would switch to Outlook. 

And I just really push on that and say, I understand, but usability tends to be something that you can learn to use the tools. They're being used by a lot of people. I mean, Microsoft 365 has a lot of users. Google has a lot of users. You can be part of that crowd of either one. I push back on that one, given the fact that you might be happier, but there's no question that other people are going to be unhappy with the change. 

Now, if you're the executive director, it's ultimately your call. But I find it much more compelling when there is some sort of functionality thing that you just need and it isn't available.

I saw someone chatted some stuff about compliance. And maybe there's some security compliance features, I think Microsoft might be a little bit stronger in that. But even there, I feel like Google and Microsoft, they're both used by a lot, a lot, a lot of people and some really big companies. I think that there are probably a lot of options in both platforms for that.  

So ultimately, I guess I think it's collaboration and the fact that, for whatever historical reason, we started out in Google, but we're in health care and all of the health care is in Microsoft 365. And it's just every time we collaborate with our partners, we're finding it challenging. It'll just be easier if we're also in Microsoft 365.  

And that's where I start to say, yeah, it makes sense. It's going to be hard. It's going to be a lot of pain to make that switch, but you're going to be happier in the long run if you do.