Email address/usage for temporary roles

[TxBeeMan]

This has had me banging my head against a wall for a couple of years now - trying to find a solution that chooses between delegated mailboxes vs. shared inbox vs. simply sharing a password to an account.   If there is another choice, I would love to hear it. 

Here is the situation: 
We are a small, non-profit club.  Specifically, a group of beekeepers in our local community (like every other social club in every town, except we do have 501c3 tax status).  Our non-profit status comes because we run a Youth Beekeeping program which teaches kids how to be beekeepers.   
Fwiw, this allows us to use GSuite for non-profits for our club. 

So in Gsuite, we have accounts for the club officers (PII Removed by Staff, etc.).  When we hold elections and a new person takes a position, I use the admin account to change the name & password - the new person inherits the old account (which is great for keeping things going).  

As a part of our youth program, we put on a fund raising event once a year. We have people in the club on a committee to run the event.  

• (PII Removed by Staff) - this person arranges the venue & usually gets the speakers
  
• (PII Removed by Staff) - this person talks to the various companies that will come to the event as a vendor
• (PII Removed by Staff) - this person is the one that handles all of the people registering for the event

Now the obvious first reaction is to simply create these accounts are regular accounts.  BUT, 

1. sometimes a position is handled by more than 1 person.  For example, the current chairman might be being helped by last year's chairman - they both need access to the account.  Same with Registration. 
2. sometimes a person in a position is ALSO a current club officer.  Now that person has to check 2 different email accounts.
3. The people serving in the positions change year after.  If the club secretary happens to be the vendor coordinator this year, we can't just make "vendors" be an alias for "secretary" because next  year one or both of those roles might be performed by 2 completely new people. 

So it looks like NONE of the choices below will really do what we're wanting

• real account where people share the password
• Delegated inbox
• Shared inbox (ala google groups). 
  
  
  

Where do I go from here?  I'm out of ideas. 

[icrew]

Could you please say a bit more about why either a delegated inbox or Google Groups Collaborative Inbox wouldn't work for this? It sounds like both of those might be a decent fit.

What I often do for a delegated inbox is to set the role account to forward to the group of people that are responsible for checking that inbox. That way, they get alerted when there's a message there. You can also now use that same group to control who has delegate access.

Cheers,

Ian

[TxBeeMan]

The collaborative inbox doesn't use the gmail interface (these are *beekeeper people* - not very tech savy).    The delegated inbox might work - I'm just not familiar with it enough to really know.  Are there some youtube vids that should how it really gets used?

For the delegated box, how would that work for a volunteer who does not have an account in our Gsuite?   

[icrew]

Sorry, somehow I never saw this response.
1) Delegated inboxes do require that the user have an account within your organization, yes.

2) I'm not sure about youtube vids about delegated inboxes, but fundamentally when you switch to a delegated inbox, you get the same Gmail interface, just working as that delegated account instead of as your personal account.

Hope that helps,

Ian

[CarrieH]

Would you set up a google group as a collaborative inbox? Is there good documentation that explains really well the differences between mail delegation vs collaborative inboxes?

[icrew]

I linked to the documentation that shows the differences between delegated access to an account's inbox vs. a group that's set up as a collaborative inbox in my reply above. I also know that @christiannewman has been working on a document that does a side-by-side comparison of the two solutions, but I'm not sure if it's been shared publicly yet.