The Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit is a set of ready-made solutions for common nonprofit scenarios, covering Constituent Management, Fundraising and Engagement, Volunteer Management, and Program Delivery. You can work with these solutions “out of the box” to get up and running quickly or extend them to meet your unique requirements. They are all based on the nonprofit common data model, which is an industry standard definition of data tables, attributes, and relationships that can work across any application and can help you unify disparate data across your organisation. All the solutions in the Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit are built on this common data model, which means they all work together and connect seamlessly. You can start with one app and expand at your own pace or deploy multiple solutions together.
The Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit brings together a range of Microsoft technologies – covering Microsoft 365, Power Platform, Dynamics 365, Azure, and LinkedIn, all tailored for the needs of the nonprofit sector. The Microsoft Cloud provides you with limitless data and analytics capabilities, and a trusted solid foundation of identity and security.
The solutions help nonprofits across the following four priority scenarios. These pillars represent Microsoft’s commitment to the nonprofit sector and guide further development and strategy for new technology solutions in this area.
Know your donors and supporters
The Fundraising and Engagement application sits at the heart of the Cloud for Nonprofit, enabling you to attract, retain, and grow donors, and centrally manage all your fundraising activity – individual donations, regular giving, pledges, and major moves. The same constituent records are used across all the solutions, so where you are managing relationships with volunteers, board members, or sponsors, you will be able to view a complete profile of all their interactions with all parts of your organisation (within the security and permissions you allow).
The fully integrated marketing solution means that you can use all the interactions and data you have about your constituent to personalise and automate donor or volunteer journeys across the lifecycle.
Deliver effective programming
Volunteer Management and Volunteer Engagement provide you with a completely connected solution to manage the end-to-end process for recruiting, onboarding, and mobilising your volunteers, maintaining information about preferences and qualifications, and automating and tracking communications throughout. You can create engagement opportunities in the app and publish them to the secure portal, receiving applications online from your volunteers, with no need to build any integration.
The Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit can also support your work with volunteers with templates for SharePoint and Teams. The volunteer centre SharePoint template provides you with a hub to share information and resources with your volunteers, providing them with easy access to everything they need for training, onboarding, or upcoming events. The Teams template makes it easy for your staff to collaborate on and streamline volunteer management activities, share documents, and complete tasks.
The Program Impact Dashboard helps you understand the impact of funds raised, programs delivered, and outcomes achieved. We know preparing reports for funders and applying for grants can be hugely time consuming, particularly when you need to gather data from multiple sources, so this rich Power BI dashboard report is designed to make that process more streamlined, giving you the metrics, performance and progress tracking you need to report on impact.
Accelerate mission outcomes
If you are working with disconnected or siloed data, it can be impossible to get a complete understanding of your constituents or engage them with appropriately targeted and personalised communications. Customer Insights brings together your data from disparate data sources, creating a unique profile for each constituent, which can then be surfaced in your other applications, putting this information in the hands of your fundraisers, volunteer managers, or marketers. You can use built in prediction models to identify donors or volunteers at risk of churn or predict lifetime donor value to help identify potential major donors.
Secure donor and program participant data
The Microsoft Cloud provides best in class security tools, and a security program specifically for nonprofits, to protect your organisation against cyberthreats. The offerings here make sure your sensitive data is protected, and can include proactive monitoring, organizational risk assessment, notification, and training for your IT staff.
How to get started
For more information or to view a guided tour, visit aka.ms/MicrosoftCloudforNonprofit
Barhead is proud to be an Australian launch partner for the Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit. We can help with advisory services, rapid deployment, or customised solution development for your organisation. If you’d like to see a demo or learn more about how this technology could work to support your mission, please reach out to us at www.barhead.com/contact.
About the Author: Lisa Crosbie
Lisa Crosbie is a Microsoft Business Applications MVP (Most Valuable Professional) and our Technology Evangelist for Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform. She leads our program of training and events which has helped over 5000 people get stared with Power Platform, and runs demos, hackathons, and workshops at Barhead Solutions to help customers understand how to get the most out of Microsoft Business Applications. She is a podcaster, YouTuber, blogger and regular presenter at Microsoft and community events.
