Best email providers for nonprofits

A community food project with two paid staff and a rotating cast of volunteers decides it needs proper email. Someone finds Google Workspace for Nonprofits, which is free, and the Microsoft nonprofit grant, which is free or close to it. Both are genuinely good, and for a registered charity with an administrator they are the right answer. This article will not pretend otherwise.

The form is where the year starts to slip. The program needs recognized charity status in a country it covers, validation through a partner such as TechSoup or Percent, and a wait that usually runs a few weeks. Schools, government bodies, most congregations, political groups and community organizations that never registered are often excluded. The food project is a registered charity, so it qualifies. Its treasurer becomes the administrator by default, because she filled in the form.

Spring brings eleven new volunteers and a request from each of them for an address on the organization's domain. On a per-user plan, even a granted one, each address is a licence someone assigns, and in October each one is a licence someone forgets to remove. The treasurer is now spending Sunday evenings in an admin console she did not ask for.

On a flat plan there is nothing to assign. Faivelo is $6 a month for the whole organization, however many mailboxes it has, so the eleven volunteers get real addresses in the time it takes to type them, and the bill in April is the same as the bill in March. When they leave, their mailboxes go and the invoice does not change. Nobody has to be the administrator, which in a nonprofit means nobody has to volunteer to be one.

The board decides that trustees should write from the organization rather than from personal accounts, and that donors should reach donate@, volunteer@, info@ and treasurer@. Nonprofits collect role addresses faster than any business, because every committee, event and appeal wants a door of its own. On a flat plan each of those is free. On a per-user plan each is a seat or a workaround.

This is also the month the treasurer asks whether there is a nonprofit discount. There is not, and here is why. Everyone pays the same $6, or $60 for the year, because that already fits the budget of a two-person charity. There is no form to fill in, nothing to re-validate every few years, and no price cliff when the grant status lapses or the headcount crosses a threshold. The list price is the nonprofit price.

The year-end appeal is the email that matters most, and it is the one a nonprofit can least afford to have land in spam. That comes down to three DNS records, SPF, DKIM and DMARC, which most volunteers have never heard of. The provider should place them at the registrar and keep them right, so that the appeal arrives and the donor's reply comes back to a real mailbox.

Then comes the part nobody planned in January: receipts for donations, confirmations for the winter event, a newsletter for the people who gave. On Faivelo those run from the same account and the same domain, so the organization adds a lane instead of another vendor and another login for the treasurer to hand over when she finally steps down.