On 10 August 2026 Google approved administrator access to Google for Nonprofits for School Aid MTÜ, Estonian register code 80646408.
Who they are. Google for Nonprofits is the programme through which Google makes its own infrastructure available to registered charities: Google Workspace for email and collaboration, the YouTube Nonprofit Program, Google Earth and Maps for field mapping, and the Google Ad Grant, which places charitable causes into search results.
What approval actually required. Google does not accept a charity’s own description of itself. Eligibility runs through independent validation of charitable status in the country of registration — in our case Estonia, and our entry in the Business Register — before Google applies its own programme criteria on top. Charities that are, in Google’s terms, governmental entities, hospitals or schools are excluded from parts of the programme regardless of how worthy the work is. Approval is a finding about legal form and public benefit, not a compliment.
Why it matters to a donor. A charity our size cannot buy attention. The people who most need to find us — a ministry of education, a school director in a rebuilt village, a logistics company with a half-empty container heading south — are searching for something specific on an ordinary afternoon. Being reachable at that moment is not marketing; it is how the work finds its way to the people who need it.
What we will not claim. Google has established that School Aid MTÜ is a genuine charity under Estonian law and admitted it to a programme open to any organisation meeting the same test. It has not endorsed our work, and we are not going to imply that it has. A reader who catches a charity overstating one thing is right to wonder what else it overstates.
Approval is the beginning of this, not the end of it. We will report here on what it actually produces.