Google Drive Trick for Nonprofits with Steve Longenecker

Community IT Innovators Nonprofit Technology Topics

Do you have important files in your nonprofits’ Google Drive that are associated with their owners’ personal gmail address? Google lets you migrate those files to Shared Drive so your organization never loses access to them.

Google Workspace is fantastically easy for nonprofit start ups to set up and doesn’t take a lot of technical know-how to manage until you grow to a larger staff size.

One of the common issues we run into is ownership of files. In Google world, the creator “owns” the files even when shared or saved on a shared Google Drive, and if that owner leaves the organization – through any number of scenarios – the organization no longer has access to those files.

Depending on how important the files are, that can cause problems! For example, if you are using an outsourced CFO – or if a photographer “shared” files with you – you can lose access.

A while back Google created “Shared Drive” and we recommend moving files from individually shared folders to organizationally owned folders.

In this podcast, Steve shares a Google Drive trick for nonprofits on migrating those files to Shared Drive relatively easily, by making the owner a temporary manager of the new folder.

The takeaways:

• Google regards the “owner” of files as the creator. Various options for sharing files may not grant complete access to those files for as long as they are needed.
• Community IT recommends creating Shared Drive in Google Workspace and migrating individual files and folders there to preserve organization access to them. This changes the “owner” from the individual to the organization.
• If you are running into migration issues with shared files disappearing, it is probably because the file was “owned” by someone outside your organization, or even someone within your organization using an individual gmail account to access Google. It is very easy to mistakenly log in to Google under other accounts to do your work!
• To migrate files in that situation, Google makes it possible to solve the ownership problem without a third-party tool. Staying within the Google universe preserves the file formats and makes migration easier. Links remain valid as will dynamic connections within Google Sheets.
• Community IT recommends creating a Shared Drive and temporarily making those external people managers with their individual gmail account. That gives them the ability to move whole folders of their files into the Shared Drive, where they become “owned” by the organization even after the individual leaves. This also helps clear up files created by external vendors where ownership needs to sit with the organization not with the individual owner, such as photos.
• It sounds complicated, but Steve walks through how to approach “ownership” in the Google Workspace universe and make data management as easy as possible.

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