• Streamlined event management with real-time collaboration tools

• Accelerated website rebrand by months with Gemini for Google Workspace

• Empowered its small team of five to work from anywhere on any device

From the desert oasis of Death Valley to the crystal-blue glacial lakes of the Canadian Rockies, environmental nonprofit Climate Ride hosts epic outdoor events to empower people to take action against climate change. Since 2008, these cycling, hiking, running, and self-designed excursions have provided nearly $14 million to environment-focused nonprofits worldwide, helping fund essential projects and initiatives to protect the planet.

“Our goal is to raise as much money as we can for nonprofits. If we can take some of the fundraising burden off of them, they can focus more on fighting climate change,” says Mackenzie Cole, partnerships manager at Climate Ride. “We do this by running meaningful, life-changing events in places where folks can see climate impacts, learn about them, and do what they can to help.”

However, to bring its events to life, Climate Ride’s team of five relied on several disparate tools that made it challenging to stay organized and keep everyone up to date. Since team members are often on-site at events, they needed a single platform that would enable them to connect and collaborate anywhere at any time on any device.

After signing up for Google for Nonprofits, Climate Ride had access to Google Workspace for Nonprofits at no cost. With its ease of use, real-time collaboration capabilities, and cloud-based availability, the platform has allowed Climate Ride to simplify operations, boost productivity, and raise more money for climate change initiatives everywhere.

Climate Ride’s team members already used Gmail and had experience using other Google Workspace tools in their personal lives, so adopting the rest of the collaboration suite was a natural move forward. Now, Climate Ride uses Google Meet for all internal and external meetings, leveraging its integration with Google Calendar to seamlessly schedule calls with nonprofits. “It’s so easy to share my schedule, rather than offering 12 times that I’m available and hoping that one works for them,” Cole explains.

The team also relies heavily on Google Docs and Sheets to manage and track its events. Previously, keeping spreadsheets accurate and aligned was a cumbersome process, with many different versions proliferating as people made changes. Now, the team can work together in a single source of truth for each event, making real-time updates without disrupting workflows or timelines.

“The ability to have multiple people in one document or spreadsheet is huge. We don’t have to worry about different iterations anymore because everything happens in one place,” Cole says. “The collaborative ability at the heart of Google Workspace allows our small crew to do more to support nonprofits.”

Team members can access Docs and Sheets through Climate Ride’s shared Google Drive, making it easy to find what they need instantly on any device. “All of the challenges we used to have trying to edit a document on the fly or access a spreadsheet at an event are gone now,” Cole says. “With Workspace, we can access everything we need, whenever and wherever we need it.”

To further empower its team to provide better fundraising support to environmental nonprofits, Climate Ride is piloting Gemini for Google Workspace. Cole uses “Help me organize” in Google Sheets to employ more sophisticated formulas to track events and campaigns over time, as well as to generate content for marketing and social media purposes.

“When we redid our website this year, Gemini saved us weeks, if not months, by supporting the idea generation process,” Cole says. “It’s become a strong collaborator for us that’s always there to bounce ideas off.”

In this way, Gemini supports outreach to the company’s Annual Fund donors, who help fund scholarships and underwrite events so that as much money as possible can go directly to nonprofits. “During our yearly Annual Fund campaign, we now use Gemini to play with email copy, collaborating with the tool to come up with fresh takes for describing our work and impact,” Cole explains. “We can experiment with novel ways to make our emails more engaging.”

By offloading repetitive, tedious tasks to Gemini, Climate Ride’s team now has more time to focus on running its events, making them unique, and creating more opportunities for people to do more for the planet.

“An important part of our work is having a tight, efficient team so we can save on our overhead and send more money to folks doing the vital work of protecting land, pushing for policy change, making our cities more bikeable, and so much more,” Cole says. “We couldn’t possibly do what we do at Climate Ride, especially with just five people, without Google Workspace. And thanks to Gemini, we can now do even more of what we do best.”