Google for Non-profits and how to activate it make sure you downgrade first.

Ok here is a confusing one for you, we got the G Suite for Non Profits after paying $$$s to run Google for months not realizing they had this terrific program. So we got most of the way there, but we didn’t realize how complex it would be to do the billing.

A General review of the proper steps

Well, they don’t tell you think when you start a non-profit, but there are some great things you should take advantage of:

Trundle over to TechSoup and get authenticate as a non-profit. You will need your IRS letter and they will validate you.
You can then go to Microsoft for Non Profits and you can get an Office 365 license set for free and also discounts on other products.
With Google, it’s a little more complicated particularly if you already have a Gsuite (now Google Workspace) account.
But basically, you get authenticated by TechSoup, then you apply to Google and wait a few days, they will then enable the Non-Profit thing for you with an email that says you can activate. This is tuned for completely new customers. If you already have an account, you get thrown into an admin page that signs you into the admin counsekl
At that point, you go to your Google Workspace account and downgrade yourself to Workspace Basic
Then contact Google Support and they manually relicense you to the Non-profit version.
You can then reupgrade to Business and Enterprise editions are reduced rates of $4/month/user rather than $12/month/user to basically get unlimited GDrive.

Got that? 🙂

Do not activate G Suite for Non Profits before you downgrade.

This requires some major untangling because if you do not downgrade first then you end up in a strange state where the Non-profit application thinks you have moved, but the G Suite (now Google workspace) side keeps charging you. Definitely puzzled tech support for a while. But if you get here make sure to follow the instructions carefully:

Login and go to SEttings/Billing/Subscriptions and choose Add a Subscription (I know it is weird that Add actually changes, but YMMV)
Then scroll to G Suite Basic and click downgrade
Now go to Activate and run it to get it to work.
If you didn’t do the deactivate first, then you have to go to the Google Workspace and click on contact and chat and have them untangle your mess. But they say it should take 48 hours for the name to change from G Suite Basic to G Suite for Non Profits, I’m betting that nothing happens 🙂