Microsoft’s Fundraising & Engagement applications have been specifically designed for the NonProfit sector by the Microsoft Tech for Social Impact team.

They’re a series of free, open-source applications designed to accelerate your fundraising and engagement activities by leveraging the power of Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Microsoft Azure.

These free applications can be used straight Out-of-the-Box to manage donations, membership levels, event planning, corporate grants and volunteer & donor data. 

However, as well as all that, because it’s Microsoft, it will integrate with all your existing fundraising activities in any other Microsoft app such as Microsoft Outlook, Excel, Word or Teams… all built using the Common Data Model for ease of data usage.

The Microsoft Fundraising & Engagement app is a NonProfit solution that can downloaded from either the Microsoft AppSource or straight from GitHub [JC1] and added straight into your organisations Dynamics 365 ecosystem.

It’s a Dynamics ‘instance’ that will integrate within the broader Microsoft tenant of your organisation.

As well as..

• Integrate with Microsoft Word to automate the drafting of letters to your donors
• Integrate with Microsoft Excel to edit data directly from your databases
• Integrate with Microsoft Outlook to automate calendar reminders and emails to donors and volunteers
• Integrate with Microsoft PowerApps to help build citizen developer apps for your individual needs
• Integrate with Microsoft Teams for extended collaboration, with video conferencing to your staff, volunteers, and donors
• Integrate with Microsoft Planner to easily plan out upcoming fundraising campaigns
•  Integrate with Microsoft PowerAutomate to easily automate repetitive tasks, streamlining your organisation so staff can move on to more important tasks
• Integrate with Microsoft PowerBI (a powerful reporting engine) to pull unique insight reports from all of your data

It’s FREE!

Ok, ok… looking for the catch?

There isn’t one!

The Microsoft Fundraising & Engagement solution is completely free for any NonProfit organisation and is distributed under a completely, 100%, open-source license.

That open-source license means your developers can use it to create bespoke solutions specifically tailored to your needs or, if you want to, you can partner with third parties like cloudThing to do if for you.

But… the great news is there’s absolutely oodles of awesome, Out-of-the-Box functionality that your organisation can instantly benefit from.

Being upfront, the caveat to all of this is that, as will all open-source software, it may cost you time and internal resources to plan, implement, test and then deploy the application.

Plus, as the Microsoft Fundraising & Engagement solution needs to exist within your organisations existing Microsoft suite there’s important things to consider and sort like user permissions and integrations with third-party software you might be running.

The last point to consider is that to run it you will need to already be using Microsoft Dynamics, meaning to access the free software you will need to purchase a Microsoft Dynamics 365 licensing agreement for your organisation.

But, all that being said it’s still a free and totally awesome solution for the NonProfit sector. Definitely if you’re already using Dynamics and if not cloudThing would be happy to advise you on how that can happen.

As already mentioned, there’s more than enough features to the Microsoft Fundraising & Engagement app to keep most NonProfits busy for a long, long time.

Should you want to work with a third party developer though, some of the ways it could be expanded might include:

• Online fundraising pages for donations, with automated Gift Aid processing built in
• Volunteer Management Systems
• Online event portals for registration, updates and ticket sales
• Virtual fundraising events to combat social distancing issues
• Automated online advocacy petitions for your chosen cause