Non-Profit Tech Blog

Sorry for the delay in posting Part 2 of this series. I’m just swamped with my work on socialmarkets. The following blog post shows how to use GoDaddy to help set up your nonprofit.Unfortunately, GoDaddy’s administration screens aren’t as simple as GoDaddy’s signup and billing screens. GoFigure. So be aware that it isn’t as simple as clicking on the green Continue button. Next article will be about how to use Google Apps

Step 1. Assuming that you’ve already signed up with GoDaddy in Part I of this series, please click on “My Account” after you’ve logged in.

Step 2. Look at the left-hand side of the screen and look for “Manage Domains”. Click on “Manage Domains”.

Step 3. Look for your nonprofit’s domain name. In this example, I called it mynonprofits.org. Click on the link to your domain name.

Step 4. Click on “Total DNS Control and MX Records”. It’s on the right-hand side of your screen.

Step 5. This is what the DNS records for your domain will look like. They’re nice but not useful for getting your site to work with Google Apps. Go to Step 6.

Step 6. Do you see the records called MX (Mail Exchange) from Step 5? To the right, there are these boxes with a little “x” in them. You need to delete these MX records to prepare your domain name to accept Google Apps. Now click on both of those little boxes.

Step 7. Now that’s done, you need to add a bunch of MX records per Google’s instructions. Click on the “Add New MX Record” box. This will allow you to enter the records for Google Apps. This will make e-mail for your nonprofit’s domain go through Google instead of the default e-mail servers that GoDaddy had set up for you. You will have to keep adding new MX records until you go through the list of Google servers.

Step 8. This is the screen for entering all of Google Apps’ information. This is a quote from Google’s FAQ on setting up MX records using GoDaddy.

For each MX Record, enter information according to the data in the table below:

• For the Select the Priority Value drop-down menu, enter the priority value.
• For Enter a Host Name, leave the default setting to @.
• For Enter Goes To Address enter the Gmail server name.
• For the Select TTL Value drop-down menu, enter 1 Week. This will appear as 604800 seconds within the DNS system.
  

  PriorityValue	HostName	Goes To Address (Mail Server)	TTLValue
  10	@	ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.	1 Week
  20	@	ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.	1 Week
  30	@	ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.	1 Week
  40	@	ASPMX2.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.	1 Week
  50	@	ASPMX3.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.	1 Week

Ok, did you enter all of the MX records? Make sure you go through all five of them and keep entering those records. That’s it for now. Your domain is now configured to pass e-mail through Google apps.