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Google Drive works great for small nonprofits
February 12, 2016

Google Drive works great for small nonprofits

Abby Perfetti | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Google Drive

We use Google Drive to store all sorts of documents in the cloud. We find it very secure and accessible. All staff of our nonprofit use it to keep documents they can access anywhere, share documents with partners (such as printers, donors, and others outside the organization), and create documents such as forms to be used by our event attendees.
  • It's easy to use. There's no troubleshooting or trying to figure out where anything is. We love that anyone with basic computer skills can quickly learn how to use Google Drive.
  • It's secure. We feel confident storing important documents there, and appreciate the different options for security settings on documents and folders.
  • The space limit is huge, saving us a lot of money over products like Dropbox, which we used to use until we couldn't afford it.
  • They keep making improvements year after year, so it gets even easier to use and more powerful.
  • Sometimes certain Word documents look strange when viewed in Google Drive.
  • The spreadsheet functions are pretty basic -- nowhere near the capability of Excel. It's a very different product and shouldn't be treated the same.
  • More options for types of files to edit would be great -- what if we could have basic photo editing capabilities in the future!
  • Since we're a social and arts nonprofit, that's hard to track. It has certainly saved us a few hundred dollars a year (that's big for our budget) because we don't need to use Dropbox anymore.
We love it. It has all the functions we need -- maybe not everything Dropbox has, but everything we're looking for and it's completely free at the level we use it. Spending is based on storage, and Google Drive gives you more than Dropbox does for free. The interface is also very intuitive, and since Google is making it, you know it will be cutting edge and have constant updates.
It's great for basic file storage and sharing for small nonprofits. I'd recommend only having a few users have access to any given folder, unless you have a plan/policy to control file editing because you don't want to lose data. I don't think there is any backup feature. If you have a large staff or are sharing lots of things all the time, it's probably better to invest in a more robust platform.

Google Drive Feature Ratings

File Sharing & Management
8.7
Video files
7
Audio files
7
Document collaboration
10
Access control
10
File search
8
Device sync
10
Cloud Storage Security & Administration
7.5
User and role management
9
File organization
6
Cloud Storage Platform
9.5
Performance
9
Reliability
10

Using Google Drive

2 - The Executive Director and the Director of Community Engagement use Google Drive. These are the top-level management positions, although the latter is a volunteer position.
1 - There is very little needed to support Google Drive, since it's very user friendly and easy to learn. If there are problems, the Director of Community Engagement troubleshoots to save the Executive Director some time, but it's usually cleared up very quickly. It helps to know about file types, internet connections, and Google account functions to support the use of Drive.
  • File sharing with outside partners such as printers, to quickly and securely send files
  • Using Google Forms to create public-facing surveys and track results
  • File backup to ensure that in a small organization such as ours, files aren't lost
It's the cheapest, most effective platform we've found to store files in the cloud.