Volunteer Offboarding Checklist for Google Workspace

Volunteers get Google Workspace accounts for a reason. They need email to coordinate events, shared drives to collaborate on campaigns, and group memberships to stay in the loop. The problem starts when they leave.

Unlike employees, volunteers rarely give two weeks' notice. Their term ends, they get busy, or they simply stop showing up. And when that happens, their Google Workspace account stays exactly as it was — active credentials, group memberships, file ownership, and all.

If your nonprofit has been running Google Workspace for more than a year, you almost certainly have ghost accounts. Most organizations we've seen have somewhere between 5 and 15 of them at any given time.

Why This Matters

Every un-offboarded volunteer account is four problems at once:

A security risk. Active credentials that nobody monitors. If compromised, you might not notice for months.
A license cost. If you're on a paid Google Workspace plan, every account costs money — even the ones nobody uses. (Here's how to reclaim those licenses.)
A group pollution source. They're still receiving emails to every group they were added to, and those emails are bouncing or piling up unread. (More on cleaning up groups.)
A data silo. Files and emails sit locked in their account, inaccessible to the people who need them.

Multiply that by the 20-30 volunteers a typical nonprofit cycles through each year, and you've got a real mess.

The Core Problem: Nobody Tells IT

In a business, HR triggers the offboarding process. Someone submits a ticket, IT disables the account, and there's a paper trail.

Nonprofits don't have that luxury. There's no HR department filing separation paperwork for volunteers. The volunteer coordinator might know someone left, but they don't think to tell whoever manages Google Workspace — if that's even a separate person.

So the account sits idle. For weeks, then months. Google Workspace has no built-in alerting for "this account hasn't been used in 90 days." Eventually someone notices the user list is twice as long as the active volunteer roster, and the cleanup becomes a project instead of a routine task.

The fix is a process. Here's the one we recommend.

The Checklist

This is adapted from our complete employee offboarding checklist, tailored to the realities of nonprofit volunteer management — less notice, less data, higher volume, and no HR department to initiate the process.

Immediately — Day 1

The moment you learn a volunteer has left (or realize they've been gone for a while):

Reset their password. This is the single most important step. It immediately prevents any further access. Do this before anything else.
Revoke app-specific passwords and OAuth tokens. If they connected third-party apps to their Workspace account, those connections survive a password reset. Go to the Admin console, find the user, and revoke all tokens.
Check for admin roles. This is critical. If the volunteer had any admin privileges — even limited ones — revoke those roles immediately. Admin access to a nonprofit's Google Workspace means access to donor data, financial records, and every other user's account.

Don't skip the admin check. It's easy to assume volunteers don't have admin access, but in small nonprofits, privileges get handed out informally. "We needed someone to manage the mailing lists" turns into a Groups admin role that nobody remembers granting.

Within the First Week

Once the account is secured, handle the data:

Review their email for critical communications. Volunteers who managed donor relationships, vendor contacts, or event logistics may have emails that are irreplaceable. Scan their inbox and sent folder before doing anything destructive.
Set up email forwarding. If someone else is taking over the role, forward incoming mail to them. This ensures nothing falls through the cracks during the transition — especially important for roles like events coordinator or volunteer manager where external contacts have the old address.
Transfer Google Drive ownership. Any documents, spreadsheets, or files owned by the departing volunteer should be transferred to the new person in that role, or to a shared drive. Untransferred files become inaccessible once the account is suspended.
Remove them from all Google Groups. Before removing, list every group they belong to. You need this inventory to know which groups to check for adequate coverage after they're removed. One less member in a four-person group is significant.
Check shared calendars. Remove their access to shared calendars and transfer ownership of any recurring events they created (weekly meetings, monthly board calls, etc.).

Within 30 Days

Suspend the account. Don't delete it — suspend it. Suspension blocks all access while preserving the data. This gives you a safety net if you discover later that something was missed.
Reclaim the license. If you're on a paid plan, suspended accounts still consume licenses unless you explicitly reclaim them. This post covers how to audit license usage.
Check external services. If the volunteer used their Workspace account to log into other tools (Slack, Canva, Zoom, project management apps), those sessions may still be active. Review and revoke.
Document what was transferred. Write down what email data was forwarded, which files were transferred, and to whom. A simple shared doc works fine. Future-you will thank present-you.

After 90 Days

Review the suspended account. Is there any remaining data worth preserving? If the volunteer's email forwarding has been running for three months without anyone needing to reference old messages, you're probably safe.
If no remaining data is needed, schedule the account for deletion.
If data still needs preserving, export it via Google Takeout or transfer the remaining items to a shared location.

Special Considerations for Nonprofits

Donor Data

If the volunteer managed donor communications, treat their email data as critical organizational records. Donor emails often contain giving history context, relationship notes, and communication preferences that never made it into your CRM. Always review before deleting.

Board Members

Board member departures are a different category entirely. Board members typically have broader access — sometimes super admin privileges, financial records, and board-only communication channels. Treat board offboarding as a separate, more thorough process with its own checklist. (Auditing admin roles is a good starting point.)

Seasonal Volunteers

Event-based volunteers — the ones who help with the annual gala, the summer program, the holiday campaign — often come back next year. For these accounts, suspend rather than delete. Label them clearly in the Admin console (add "SEASONAL - SUSPENDED" to the account name or organizational unit) so they don't get caught in a cleanup sweep. Reactivate when the season returns.

Shared Accounts

Some nonprofits create shared functional accounts: events@, volunteer@, info@. These are fine, but they need documented ownership. Decide who is responsible for each shared account and write it down somewhere accessible. When that person leaves, ownership transfers as part of their offboarding. Undocumented shared accounts are how you end up with email addresses that nobody can access and everyone relies on.

Preventing the Backlog

The checklist above handles individual departures. But the bigger problem is the volunteers who leave without telling anyone. You need a system to catch those.

Set a quarterly calendar reminder to review all user accounts. The process takes about 15 minutes:

Pull up your full user list in the Admin console (or in MonitorWorkspace, where it's sortable by last login date).
Compare it against your current active volunteer roster.
Anyone not on the roster and not logged in for 90+ days gets flagged for offboarding.

This single habit prevents the problem from compounding. Fifteen minutes four times a year saves you from the annual "why do we have 40 accounts for 15 active volunteers" cleanup project.

Quick Reference

When	Action	Why
Day 1	Reset password, revoke tokens, check admin roles	Block access immediately
Week 1	Review email, set up forwarding, transfer files, remove from groups	Preserve data, maintain continuity
Day 30	Suspend account, reclaim license, check external services, document transfers	Reduce costs, close security gaps
Day 90	Review suspended account, delete or export remaining data	Final cleanup
Quarterly	Compare user list to active roster, flag inactive accounts	Prevent backlog

The Hardest Part Is Knowing When to Start

The checklist above works great when someone tells you a volunteer left. The real problem is the ones who just... stop showing up. Nobody sends you a resignation email. They just go quiet.

That's why the quarterly roster check matters more than any individual offboarding step. MonitorWorkspace makes it a 5-minute filter instead of a spreadsheet exercise — sort by last login, compare against your active roster, flag the ghosts. Do it four times a year and the backlog never builds up.