In summer 2025 Google announced multiple updates to its Nonprofits suite, including program expansion into 100+ new countries and the exciting addition of Maps ad placements within the Google Ad Grant, the first-ever opportunity for Grantees to run non-search ad formats. But we might be equally excited about the new opportunities afforded to nonprofit orgs through the Workspace tool, which now boasts more than 10 additional AI features for social impact clientele.
Imagine if a Casino Gave You FREE Chips…
Imagine walking into a casino where the chips are free—every day. That’s the reality for nonprofits approved for Google for Nonprofits. Instead of spending thousands on AI tools, you’re handed a fresh stack of daily tokens to use powerful AI products like Gemini, NotebookLM, AI in Sheets, Veo, and Imagen. If you don’t use them, they disappear. Use it or lose it. This article explains how nonprofits can take full advantage of these free tools, what each one does, and why ignoring them is leaving real money on the table.
How You Qualify for Workspace for Nonprofits
If your organization is already enrolled in Google for Nonprofits, you automatically qualify for free access to Google Workspace tools with AI built in. That includes Gemini, NotebookLM, and AI-powered features in Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. There’s no new application or add-on required. You’re already sitting on the value—you just need to use it.
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What You Get: Daily Free AI Tools with Real Value
Gemini is Google’s AI assistant and a strong alternative to tools like ChatGPT. It’s capable of writing grants, creating social copy, summarizing research, building spreadsheets, and more. For a team of 20, access to Gemini could easily replace $10,000 or more in annual AI tool subscriptions.
NotebookLM lets you upload long, complex documents and ask questions about them. It generates cited, accurate summaries and answers, saving hours of manual review. Perfect for board briefings, grant reports, or onboarding materials.
AI in Google Sheets uses Gemini to automate spreadsheet tasks—formula creation, data tagging, categorization, forecasting, and more. For operations or data-driven teams, it’s a game-changer.
Veo is Google DeepMind’s AI video generator. Nonprofits can use it to create promotional or educational videos without hiring a video team. Describe your video, and Veo generates it for you.
Imagen is Google’s AI-powered image editing and generation tool. Great for social posts, campaign visuals, or conceptual images to pitch to stakeholders or funders.
Why It Matters: Don’t Leave $10K on the Table
Most nonprofits wouldn’t knowingly leave a $10,000 grant unclaimed. But by not using these daily AI tools already included in the Google for Nonprofits suite, that’s effectively what’s happening. Gemini alone, if paid for commercially at $20/user/month, would cost a team of 20 nearly $5,000 a year. Add in the functionality of NotebookLM, AI spreadsheet automation, video creation, and image editing, and you’re easily looking at $10,000+ in equivalent value.
What is Google Workspace?
Workspace is Google’s core business suite for companies and organizations, aggregating traditional professional tools such as GMail, Google Meet, and Google Docs. These days, Workspace is also inclusive of Google’s powerful AI technologies, such as Gemini, Google’s primary AI assistant, and NotebookLM.
Typical subscriptions to these technologies don’t come cheap, and Workspace offers business users tiers of access corresponding to their paid plan level. But these AI tools, among Google’s most powerful products, are available to Google for Nonprofit users for free, making them no-brainers instead of nice-to-haves.
Google’s data privacy commitments for its nonprofit Workspace users are also among some of the best available when it comes to free AI resources — Workspace boasts “enterprise-grade data protections” for these accounts, and does not train its generative AI models on the data input by its Google for Nonprofit users.
Workspace for Nonprofits: Explore Google’s AI Tools
Workspace is a collection of more than 15 of Google’s professional resources — among these, there are AI features that stand on their own, such as Gemini or NotebookLM, as well as AI integrations within the tools you know and love, like Google Docs. Explore common nonprofit use cases for each tool below, including examples and ideas to get you started.
Gemini App
Gemini Overview
Gemini is Google’s proprietary LLM and foundational AI assistant. For anyone who’s experimented with any of the well-known LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude, etc.), this is Google’s version, providing all the now-familar AI chat features. Gemini’s basic functions are already incredibly powerful, but your Google for Nonprofit status gives you access to additional advanced features including image generation capabilities, audio overviews (ability to create podcast-style conversations from text input), and collaborative tools like Canvas and quizzes. Nonprofit Workspace accounts also include tiers of access to two other high-powered Gemini tools that deserve extra attention: Gems and Deep Research.
Gems
Gems are custom versions of the Gemini LLM interface designed to provide tailored responses based on your specific needs. For example, some pre-made Gems available from Google include the “Brainstormer,” intended to help you find inspiration on any topic, be it event ideas or creative ad campaigns. Or the “Coding Partner,” made to help you tackle various technical tasks like updating a website’s tracking code, or even building an app. By customizing a Gem assistant with information on a particular goal or topic, you can improve the quality of your AI output to enhance your strategy and final product, as well as save time in your process of prompting and priming the neutral Gemini interface with the context you need for recurring use cases.
4 Ways Nonprofits Can Use Gemini Gems
- The “Plain Language Summarizer” Gem: Simplify complex text from jargon-filled documents like legal contracts or technical reports into clear, concise, and easy-to-understand summaries. This can help anyone in your organization get a quick overview of any lengthy document.
- The Donor Communication Gem: Provide a Gem with your organization’s brand voice, mission statement, and information on donor segments to draft email campaigns, marketing copy, thank you notes, or appeal letters.
- The Media Kit Gem: Supply information about your organization’s mission, the work and achievements of key staff members, or past organizational successes to draft press releases or media kit summaries.
- The Volunteer Coordinator Gem: Upload your volunteer handbook, open job descriptions, or a list of upcoming events. Then use your Gem to draft emails calling on potential volunteers, generate training materials, or answer frequently asked questions.
Example: Power Poetry’s Slam Poet Gem
Using our longtime partner, the online teen writing community Power Poetry as an example, we created a Gem that would act as an administrative assistant for planning and organizing online poetry slam events for young poets. When prompting the Gem, we used a combination of “persona,” “task,” “context,” and “format” to inform it of our needs.
Additional items that could be added include a rubric for judging poetry slam contestants, an internal event planning template, the Power Poetry brand and style guide, and emcee scripts for hosts.
Once built, the “Slam Coach” gem was ready to start planning a great poetry slam!
Deep Research
Deep Research in the Gemini app is like having a dedicated, highly-trained research assistant on your team who can scan current, credible sources and return a clear, source-backed report in minutes. This is especially useful for nonprofit orgs that need reliable information quickly to support their operations, but do not always have the staff capacity or available hours to dig through search results.
5 Ways Nonprofits Can Use Gemini Deep Research
- Grant research: Gather recent statistics, case studies, and policy updates relevant to your focus area before drafting a grant proposal.
- Fundraising preparation: Before meeting with a new donor or partner, ask for a summary of their recent projects, giving history, and public priorities so you walk into the conversation well-informed.
- Program planning: Identify examples of similar programs that have launched in the last two years and review their budgets, reported outcomes, and community reception.
- Advocacy work: Quickly review the latest developments on a bill or policy change so your team can respond with timely, data-backed messaging.
- Community research: Compile demographic and economic trends for a specific region to inform service planning or outreach.
Example: Establishing the “Pantheon of Pop Poets” with Gemini Deep Research
As an online poetry and creative writing forum, Power Poetry is always interested in understanding the evolving landscape of digital poetics and the role of social media in increasing youth engagement with poetry. Power Poetry often highlights new or emerging young poets, and is particularly interested in opportunities to collaborate with writers whose influence might intersect with their online audience.
When we ask Gemini to identify the “top social media poets in 2025” for Power Poetry content and marketing planning, the tool can put together a quick list of relevant names (Rupi Kaur, Amanda Gorman, etc.), with some brief acknowledgement of the various ways this ask can be interpreted or evaluated. However, when we select the option to further engage Deep Research (“Have Gemini create a detailed research report”) on this topic, we see every step of a longer, more detailed analysis laid out for us. Deep Research can “show thinking,” outlining the nuances of defining “top 5” social media poets across factors ranging from online following, to cultural impact, to publishing success. It also lays out the range of considerations, sources it intends to review, and the steps it will take to refine its output at each stage.
Once Deep Research is ready to share its final report, it shares an easily exportable set of top social media poets and their defining characteristics (platforms, publications, themes in writing). However, it frames this output within the context of a full-fledged essay that dissects the current landscape of digital poetics, considers the pro and con arguments for the accessibility vs. commercialization of online poetry, and lists its complete sources.
While we can ultimately get the answer we need from the table alone, the additional information provided by Deep Research gives us extra confidence in the methodology used to generate results, including, importantly, a revision of the original Gemini answer to the question. It also surfaces considerations about the language and criteria we as an organization might use to define, promote, and collaborate with “social media poets” as we originally labeled them.
NotebookLM
NotebookLM is a strategic AI research and project management assistant that allows you to upload your own documents and then ask questions, get summaries, or extract specific details from them — basically, it allows you to leverage the power of Google’s LLM technology within your organizational context. This helps nonprofits centralize their existing reports, proposals, and notes, leveraging everything from styling to past insights in creating more customized AI results, without having to search through and reference their own files manually. As Google describes it, NotebookLM is designed to function as a personal research partner — not just providing answers, but also sources and exact quotes.
5 Ways Nonprofits Can Use NotebookLM
- Board preparation: Upload annual reports, financial statements, and strategy documents, then generate short summaries or answer questions for upcoming board meetings.
- Donor communication: Review past newsletters, thank-you letters, and case studies to find stories that could be repurposed for an upcoming fundraising appeal.
- Volunteer training: Turn existing training manuals into quick-reference guides or quizzes for onboarding new volunteers.
- Event follow-up: Review last year’s event notes, vendor contracts, and feedback surveys to identify what went well and what needs improvement for future events.
- Grant renewal support: Compile past applications, reports, and impact data to produce a draft outline for a renewal proposal.
Example: Generating New Poetry Prompts for Teen Writers
On their website, Power Poetry provides a range of resources to help prompt young writers to share their poems, as well as how-tos and informational resources to help them develop their writing style.
If we wanted to use NotebookLM to support Power Poetry’s content planning efforts and identify opportunities for new resources and writing prompts, we can feed the platform a number of resources to pull from, including: web links for existing slams, recent or successful articles, and an upload of Power Poetry’s internal editorial style guide. NotebookLM can generate new content ideas grounded in the context of Power Poetry’s tone, common themes, and gaps or opportunities within existing resources. When promoted with such input, NotebookLM generated the following article ideas, all of which offer mission-aligned starting points for Power Poetry in their content planning:
- Mastering Metaphor & Simile: Elevate Your Poetic Imagery
- Poetry for Change: How to Use Your Voice to Advocate for Social Justice
- Beyond the Solitary Act: How Community Fuels Your Poetic Journey
While these ideas might still need some finessing before they make it to the content calendar, additional prompting, resource content, and ongoing review can help push NotebookLM towards strong first-draft ideas that save time for our marketing team.
Gemini for Workspace
Gemini for Workspace offers a number of cross-product integrations, bringing AI functionality into tools your team already uses everyday, like Google Docs and Google Sheets. These AI add-ons might not feel like a dramatic enhancement, but don’t sleep on the extra value and time-saving capacity these integrations bring to daily workflows.
4 Ways Nonprofits Can Use Gemini in Google Sheets or Google Docs
- Donor segmentation: Upload your donor data to Sheets and use Gemini to segment your list for more tailored donor communications. This might mean segmenting by gift size, donation recency, or region.
- Cross-channel content generation: Similar to Gems and NotebookLM, Gemini in Sheets and Docs can generate content tailored to your brand voice. Utilize Gemini in your social media posting calendar to draft social content in Sheets or Doc for posting.
- Survey response review: Upload survey responses from volunteers or constituents and have Gemini summarize key trends and takeaways that you can take to your leadership team.
- Campaign performance analysis: Ask Gemini to help you review digital ad campaign performance and generate initial insights on messaging, ad creative, and targeting strategies that work or don’t work for your campaign goals.
Example: National Poetry Month Marketing
Every year, major literary organizations, authors, and educational institutions highlight the power of poets and poetry with National Poetry Month events. If Power Poetry is planning for a robust, month-long marketing campaign highlighting their poets’ great work, promoting a new slam, and hopefully signing up new platform users, they will have a lot of marketing assets to draft and coordinate. Access to Gemini right in their marketing documents makes it easy for them to streamline these cross-channel efforts — for instance, if they have Instagram post copy drafted in Google Sheets, they can easily use in-cell Gemini functions to draft Meta ad campaign copy aligned with their Instagram posts. Then, they can use Gemini in Docs to draft a more expansive email campaign aligned with their series of posts. Remember, AI output is a first, not final draft — but Gemini integrations make it easy to automate the most tedious or repetitive marketing tasks, creating extra time and brain space to focus on impactful, human-centered content and storytelling.
Pro Tip: Whenever you’re using Gemini in Sheets, use a separate tab to bank your AI prompts for easy prompt selection and organization across multiple cells.
Why Your Nonprofit Needs Workspace
We know that every new tech platform brings its own set of challenges for nonprofit teams, not least of which is the time and capacity required to learn and properly manage them. But we also know that every nonprofit knows how to make the most of all their resources, and we know how much this matters now more than ever in our current climate of economic and political uncertainty. Think of Workspace just as you would the Google Ad Grant, or any other grant. These AI resources cost other businesses thousands of dollars, but your organization can easily access them for free. Don’t leave this money on the table.
Workspace is available to eligible 501(c)(3)s through the Google for Nonprofits program. Creating a Google for Nonprofits account will give you access to tools like Workspace, the Google Ad Grant (up to $10k per month in in-kind Google search advertising), and the YouTube Nonprofit program, which includes YouTube Giving and other features that directly support your social impact goals. If you haven’t already, get started with Google for Nonprofits today. Once your organization’s account is verified, you’ll be able to activate Workspace and other nonprofit products.
For many organizations, activating Google Workspace for nonprofits might be your first formal foray into using AI tools. We believe in helping nonprofits keep up with the AI curve without sacrificing either the quality of your services or compromising on your values. Enroll in our Google AI for Nonprofits cohort sessions for a crash course in the basics of good policies and good prompting that gets you the best output from your AI tools and your team.