IndustriesNonprofit
Small budgets, donated licences, and a new volunteer to set up every week.
Charities and community organisations run lean. The Microsoft licences are donated or discounted, volunteers arrive and leave constantly, and board members need to see the papers without becoming staff. The IT has to be cheap, tidy and safe, in that order and all at once.
What breaks
What breaks in an organisation run on goodwill.
Donated licences assigned to people who left two years ago
The nonprofit grant covers a fixed number of Microsoft 365 seats. Half are held by former staff and volunteers, so new people get shared accounts or personal Gmail, and the organisation is paying for seats it does not need.
A volunteer starts on Tuesday and another leaves on Thursday
Onboarding is whoever has time. Offboarding is nobody. The mailing list, the donor database and the shared drive accumulate logins that belong to people no one has seen in months.
Board members get the papers by personal email
Board packs, financials and minutes go to a dozen personal inboxes because giving directors a staff account felt wrong. Now the most sensitive documents in the organisation live outside it.
Donor data is in the CRM, and also in three spreadsheets
Names, gifts and personal details are duplicated across systems, exported for a mail-out and never deleted. Privacy obligations apply to a charity the same as to a company.
Grant reports need numbers nobody can pull
Outcomes, participants and spend are in a program laptop, a spreadsheet and someone's memory. The report takes a week and the funder still asks a follow-up question.
The software you run
We look after what it runs on.
Donated Microsoft 365, a donor CRM, an accounting package and the program tools each team chose. We keep the licences honest, the accounts tidy, and the data where it belongs.
The vendor supports the application. We manage the machines, accounts, network and backups it depends on, and we make the call to the vendor so you do not have to.
- Microsoft 365 for nonprofits
- Donated and discounted licences through Microsoft's nonprofit programme and TechSoup, assigned to real people and reclaimed when they leave
- Donor management
- Keela, Bloomerang, Raiser's Edge NXT, Sumac or Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud, with CanadaHelps and the payment processor feeding it
- Finance
- QuickBooks Online or Sage, with fund and grant tracking, and the auditor's access set up once a year
- Programs and volunteers
- Volunteer scheduling tools, sign-up forms, and the program laptops that hold outcome data
- Board and governance
- A Teams channel or SharePoint site for board papers, with directors as guests rather than staff accounts
- Communications
- Mailchimp or similar for newsletters, Canva for design, Zoom for meetings, and the website
Software commonly used in Nonprofit.
A scenario, not a case study
A fourteen-person organisation with forty active volunteers.
Suppose a Calgary community organisation with fourteen staff, forty regular volunteers, a nine-person board, and a Microsoft 365 nonprofit grant that has never been audited.
This is an illustration of how the service works in a business like yours. It does not describe a client.
- Week 1
The audit finds licences assigned to former staff and long-gone volunteers. They are reclaimed, new staff get their own accounts, and the organisation stops paying for the seats above the grant it did not need.
- Week 2
Volunteers get accounts with an end date. When the date passes, the account is disabled on its own, and the coordinator gets a list to extend or confirm. Nobody has to remember.
- Week 2
The nine directors are added as guests to a board Teams channel. They see the papers, they do not get a staff mailbox, and the packs stop going to personal email.
- Week 3
The executive director's laptop is stolen from a car. It is encrypted and enrolled, so it is wiped remotely before lunch. Her files were in OneDrive and are on the replacement by the afternoon.
- Month 2
The donor CRM and the accounting system are connected so a gift is recorded once. The three spreadsheets are retired, and the one export for the mail-out is deleted after use.
- Quarter end
The grant report's participant and spend figures come from the program data and the books, pulled by an automation the coordinator runs in an afternoon instead of a week.
What we would put in place
What we would put in place for a nonprofit.
A licence audit, a volunteer account lifecycle and guest access for the board fix most of it, and most of that is inside the smallest package.
Cloud & Microsoft 365
Donated licences audited and reclaimed, volunteer accounts that expire on their own, and directors as guests rather than staff.
Read about cloud & microsoft 365IT support
A help desk for staff and coordinators, and onboarding and offboarding that happens because it is a ticket, not a favour.
Read about it supportCybersecurity
MFA on every account including volunteers, email filtering for the donation and invoice scams that target charities, and encrypted laptops.
Read about cybersecurityBackup & recovery
Microsoft 365 and the program laptops backed up, so a stolen laptop or a deleted folder is an afternoon rather than a crisis.
Read about backup & recoveryBusiness process automation
Gifts entered once, grant report figures pulled from the systems, and the spreadsheets retired.
Read about business process automationWeb development
A site that loads on a phone and takes a donation, from $2,000, that your team can update without asking anyone.
Read about web development
The package we usually recommend
Essential
- per user, per month
- from $75–95
Essential includes the help desk, monitoring, patching, email security, Microsoft 365 backup and basic MFA, which is most of what a small organisation needs, priced per person with a login. Organisations that hold sensitive client data or face funder security requirements usually move to Professional.
Final pricing depends on environment complexity, compliance requirements and support scope, and is confirmed after the IT audit.
Fair questions
What nonprofit businesses ask us.
- We cannot afford managed IT.
- Essential is priced per person with a login, and volunteers who do not need one do not count. Against the cost of a lost laptop or a donor data leak, most organisations find it is the cheapest line in the IT budget.
- Can you work with our donated licences?
- Yes. The nonprofit grant is the first thing we audit. Most organisations are holding seats they do not need and missing ones they do, and the fix costs nothing.
- Our board wants to keep using personal email.
- They can keep their email. Board papers move to a guest-access channel they open with their own address, so the documents stay inside the organisation and the directors do not get a new inbox to check.
- We received a technology grant. What should it go on?
- Usually the unglamorous things: encrypted laptops, backups, one account per person. We will tell you honestly if the shiny thing on the list is not the priority.
Book a free IT audit.
No obligation and no pitch deck. We look at what you have, tell you what is wrong with it, and you decide what to do with that.
- A full inventory of your devices, accounts and licences
- A written list of the security gaps we find
- What your current setup is costing you against a flat per-user rate
Prefer to talk? Get in touch