Is your church, ministry or nonprofit organization using Microsoft 365?
Did you know that you might be able to get a free license?
It’s true!
Qualified nonprofits can get Office 365 for free or at a ‘significant discount.’ As those working for a nonprofit know, finding the financial resources to spend on even the most basic of technology needs can be difficult—and Microsoft is here to help. 🙂
Office 365 Nonprofit
No matter what your nonprofit status may be, I think it’s worth taking a look—if you’re interested in having Office 365 as a tool and resource in your organization. There are varying degrees of what you get and how much it costs. Best case scenario, you’ll walk away with free or discounted software. Worst case scenario, you keep rollin’ as you are.
You can get a better idea of what you get on the Office 365 for nonprofits page:
I am not sure of Microsoft’s process of determining where your nonprofit lies in their pricing structure, so if you’re had any experience with this—please—leave a comment below. I would love to hear more about how easy or difficult it was to apply, and so on.
Learn more on the Office 365 for nonprofits website, and sign-up for the free trial to get started and take the appropriate steps to find out what kind of discounts you can get for your nonprofit.
Peter Schott says
Been trying to get this set up for a while. We’re in Texas, where we don’t actually have to show proof of non-profit status as a church for many things in-state. We’re also under a denominational umbrella rather than having our own 501c3 status. To get this set up easily, it seems that we need some sort of proof from the parent organization that we’re under them and an official letter explaining why our name differs. I need to jump through those hoops at some point – just haven’t been ready for it. In the meantime, the churches/orgs I’ve set up were grandfathered in to old Google Standard accounts w/ 200 users each. That won’t last forever, but it’s good for now. When Google starts cracking down, we’ll probably make the switch.
Eric Dye says
At which point, it’ll be totally worth the trouble I’m sure. 🙂
Michael Findley says
Peter, we are having the same problem with the 501c3. I tried getting non-profit status with google for years and couldn’t because we don’t need the actual form in Texas. If you figure out a way to sign up for Office 365 please let me know. It is good to see we aren’t the only church having this issue.
Peter Schott says
Michael, if you follow the instructions at TechSoup, it’s something like getting a letter from the main denomination/organization explaining why you have a different name/address as well as something indicating their 501 status. It’s all outlined. I just haven’t gone through that process yet, but if you can actually talk to someone up the chain, you might have a bit more success. http://www.techsoup.org/ should be a decent starting point and when I registered, they gave pretty good instructions. At the time, we hadn’t gotten our charter paperwork signed so I couldn’t progress and it just hasn’t been a huge priority since then.
Brian says
We also fall under a tax exemption group (the umbrella you mentioned) for our organization. We also just recently received approval through both Microsoft and Google. Of the two, I’d say Google was the stricter of the two, mainly because Google is much more automated that MS, but both did get approved.
The key part to both approvals, as previously mentioned, was a letter from our organizations headquarters stating that we were a member and fell under the group exemption. We’ve had a letter on file for about a decade now, so we make scans/copies and supply them whenever we need to prove our nonprofit status. It’s definitely worth getting the letter from HQ,.
Kevin Anderson says
I highly recommend getting setup with TechSoup. When you are setup with TechSoup all the requirements for Microsoft donated software are already worked out. In addition, through TechSoup you have access to all sorts of other free and discounted software, services, and hardware. TechSoup is a very good place to start.
VietChristian says
Thanks for the information! I’ll take a look at Office 356.
Eric Dye says
Cool!
Eric J says
Our church has used this to get cheap office E2 for everyone on staff and key volunteers. I think it is like $4 per user per month. The office E1 is kindof lame because it is only webapps.
Eric Dye says
Lame indeed!
Has it been worth $4 per month?
Eric J says
Yes i think so, last year we transition from XP to 7 and Office 2007 to Office 2013 via O365. It was kindof a rough transition for the staff and every once in a while we run into licensing issues with office saying it isn’t activated.
Robert Mitchell says
We use Office 365 for my non-profit and it is great! To get around the webapps, we just purchase Office 2013 from TechSoup for super cheap. This only means we have to manage our software separate from Office 365 but it isn’t too hard with 45 employees. It all still works seamlessly.
Eric Dye says
Very cool. 😀
Michael Ervin says
I set up Office 365 for my church a while back and my only disappointment has been the implementation of getting a calendar of events to actually be “public.” It’s a perfectly great solution to have in-house, but getting the darn thing to integrate into a website is nowhere near as easy as it is with Google Apps for Nonprofits. Even with the better integration into Microsoft product lines, I’d venture to say that my overall experience would lead me to use Google more often than Microsoft, regardless of how I feel about the reach of their “tentacles.”
Eric Dye says
Interesting. Awesome feedback and user experience, Michael. 🙂