Can you help us get the Microsoft and Google nonprofit licensing?

Both Microsoft and Google run substantial nonprofit programs, and the value is real. For a qualifying organization, a meaningful number of staff licenses can be granted at no cost, with discounted rates above that threshold and on the higher tiers. Over a year, for an organization with twenty staff, this is not a rounding error.

What we do: confirm eligibility, handle the validation process, which involves a third party verifying your charitable status and is more paperwork than difficulty, get the grant applied to your existing tenant rather than creating a second one, and then reconcile what you are actually paying against what you should be.

That last part is where we most often find money. The common situations:

• Enrolled but still paying. The grant was approved and never applied to the subscriptions, so the organization pays for licenses it is entitled to receive. We see this regularly.
• Two tenants. Someone set up the nonprofit tenant separately from the one already in use, and now there are two environments and two bills. Consolidating is a project and it is worth doing.
• Paying for people who left. With volunteer and part time turnover this drifts badly. A license review usually finds several.
• The wrong tier everywhere. Not everyone needs the highest tier. Some people need very little, and mixing tiers appropriately saves real money without anyone losing what they use.

Worth knowing: there are eligibility limits and exclusions, the grant covers staff rather than unlimited volunteers, and paid tiers are discounted rather than free. Also, the grant does not include backup. Microsoft protects their service and that is not the same as you having a recoverable copy of your own data, which for an organization holding donor records matters.

Beyond Microsoft and Google, TechSoup is the usual route to discounted software and hardware more broadly, and a number of security and backup vendors run their own nonprofit pricing that is not advertised. We will ask on your behalf, because the answer is often yes and it never gets offered unprompted.