Urgent Help Needed before we loose all cloud files
What the devil do I have to do to get help with a serious problem with the cloud for our non-profit business account for our small charity. I have 'lost' sight of a large number of documents (folders are visible but no documents) from the cloud since we had to start paying for our subscription. After many chats with ai and emails and the problem being escalated I have now been told to go back to where I started at Non-profit support and put a support ticket in. Doesnt matter what machine I use, what browser I use, what network I use, I cannot get past the submit form page and keep getting an error message - this has been going on for weeks now. Ive tried ringing and the call keeps dropping while on hold - no one, no-one will call me about the problem and no one seems interested in dealing with the problem and its not just affecting me on our system either. Can someone help me find a person to speak to and not AI - ai help is not getting me anywhere at all.
Build It Yourself? Part 1: A Proportionate Architecture
How can a smaller nonprofit organisation centralise data for people who haven't been hired yet, working in departments that don't exist yet, doing work that no one has thought of yet? Here’s the architecture for a possible solution that takes advantage of Microsoft's shared responsibility policies. I will go on to test to see if it’s feasible for a small nonprofit organisation with self-taught IT champions. https://headandheart.info/in-practice/20260714-build-it-yourself-part-1-a-proportionate-architecture/
Goodstack-Validated Nonprofit Rejected After Forced Resubmission — No Escalation Path
I am posting this because Microsoft Elevate frontline support told me there are no further escalation paths available, and I believe this may affect other nonprofits. Timeline of facts: - June 19, 2026: Goodstack, Microsoft's authorized validation partner, confirmed our nonprofit (Opera Verace Foundation, EIN 33-2305878, California 501(c)(3)) was approved for Microsoft nonprofit grants and discounts. - June 23, 2026: Microsoft Elevate support informed me the original application was in an unrecoverable system error state due to an unrecoverable error in their system, and they instructed me to resubmit under a different email address. I only had one email directed to my business email and asked if I could use a Yahoo email. - June 30, 2026: The same Elevate representative confirmed in email to me that using a Yahoo email address as a temporary workaround was fully supported and "the correct and supported path forward." - July 2026: A different Microsoft Validation Team (not the one I had worked with originally) rejected the resubmission (likely due to use of a yahoo.com email as my business email address) and demanded documents not listed in the published eligibility requirements, including a bank statement. They stated the original Goodstack approval cannot be reinstated. - When I pointed out that Goodstack's validation was never rescinded, that my organization's nonprofit status can be confirmed on propublica online, and that the resubmission existed solely due to Microsoft's own system error and instructions, I was told this was a determination of another team and no further escalation paths exist. The core issue: Goodstack validated our organization on Microsoft's behalf. Microsoft's own system error forced resubmission. Microsoft's own representative authorized the (incorrect) workaround in writing. The Validation Team is now treating the workaround submission as a brand new independent submission requiring extraordinary measures for re-validation, ignoring the Goodstack validation, ignoring the request to check propublica, and ignoring the fact that thier reuest for additional documents is nowhere to be found in Microsoft's own document requirements in Microsoft's published nonprofit eligibility policies. Ticket number: 2606210040000788 Is anyone at Microsoft able to escalate this to someone with authority over the Validation Team? Has anyone else encountered this after being directed to use a personal email for resubmission?
Fundraising and Engagement without Costumer Insights?
We are a nonprofit considering Fundraising and engagement which by itself looks great. However, we are yet a small nonprofit, so we don’t have the financial means to invest in Dynamics 365 Costumer Insights at this point. We find Costumer Insights to be very expensive compared to other Microsoft nonprofit offers. Is F&E still valuable if we combine it with Mailchimp? - How do we communicate campaigns and get results? In two separate systems? - Does Mailchimp engagement journeys work together with F&E or would we maintain two separate systems? What about the leadscoring and “Likelihood to donate" in F&E? How does these perform when we don’t use Costumer Insights engagement journeys, website engagement and more? We assume the data collections lowers and thus making the leadscoring worse. Hope someone has relevant experiences to share.Launching DIY Data Control for Nonprofits
I want to create a library of open-source resources that helps self-taught IT champions in nonprofit organisations build fully governed, secure shared data systems. I have plenty of ideas about how to do this, but before I press ahead, I want to listen to the people I hope to support to ground those ideas in reality. For my first project, I want to draw on part of the Microsoft ecosystem, which provides some useful tools for safely building your own data systems: Microsoft Learn: Microsoft provides a wealth of free learning resources. I use them a lot and they are as good as other resources that I have happily paid for. The two big barriers to using them are finding time and working out where to start. The Common Data Model for Nonprofits: This is an open-source resource from Microsoft, it describes the tables of data that a nonprofit organisation needs, and the relationships between them. Once you add your own data it becomes a shared functioning model of your organisation. Role based column and row level security: This is the revolutionary part that lets you safely replace scattered spreadsheets with a single, comprehensive, shared model of your organisation. It lets you decide exactly which parts of which records people are allowed to see or change, so everyone who interacts with your shared model can only see and change the things that they need to. Model-driven Power Apps and Power BI: Once you have a detailed model of your organisation with governance baked into it, adding tools to interact with it becomes straightforward. Both Model-driven Power Apps and Power BI can understand the structure of your organisation from your model, and they will respect the governance policies that you built into it. In theory, these should provide all the tools you need to bring together scattered data in siloed spreadsheets into a single, secure, auditable shared source of truth. But there are gaps, and I want to find out what guides, signposts and tools would be needed to bridge them. Later I will want to explore the features that you could add with Copilot Studio if you wanted to. Once you have established a clearly defined, precisely secured data environment, Copilot Studio can provide the tools to develop and deploy AI agents safely. But for now, I will focus on the foundations of well-defined, well-governed, accessible data. If you have any thoughts about this project then I would love to hear them, and I’d especially like to find out what pain-points there are that I can target. So please do get in touch. Patrick Killeen Head and Heart CIC email address removed for privacy reasons https://www.headandheart.info/ This work is released under the MIT Licence and is available at https://github.com/head-and-heart-cic/public/blob/main/in-practice/2600707-launching-diy-data-control-for-nonprofits/README.md
Still confused by the nonprofit switch by Microsoft
I am so sorry if this is duplicated, but everywhere I turn, the information is different. Currently, we have the following and number of licenses for each: (3) Business Premium expire 10/1/2025 (4) Power Automate with an expiration of n/a (4) Nonprofit portal expire 4/20/2033 (5) 365 E1 with expire of 4/24/26 As for Power Automate and Nonprofit Portal, I think there is no change to those (although I have no idea what they are). Tech Soup is saying that https://cloud.techsoup.org/product/?id=325C813E-15C3-4995-837F-B18F00828ED1 is $1 per month per license, but I read in other venues that there are 10 donated. Microsoft hosts our email. We have 3 email addresses are used for both email and One Drive. We have another 2 that are desktop locations that really do not use email but use One Drive and we have 1 that we only use as an email for a specific project. This means we have 6 email addresses, as some are in 1 license group and not the other. I am so confused. I don't understand why we have both Business Premium and 365 E1. And why there are some email addresses are in both but not all. Because 365 E1 does not expire until 4/24/26, does that mean I do not have to do anything until next April for those email addresses that are listed in this category. But would need to change for the email addresses in Business Premium, even though some are in both? I do understand the web-version vs desktop options.Will Microsoft’s Fundraising Template App Be Supported Long-Term?
Since Microsoft retired the Fundraising and Engagement app, they’ve introduced template apps for partners and customers to build solutions. Over the past year, we did lot of customizations on top of the Fundraising and Engagement app, and we’re now considering moving these customizations and needed functionality to the ‘Fundraising’ template app. However, we’re concerned about long-term stability. Can Microsoft confirm if there’s any risk of these templates being retired or delisted? This would help us and others plan with greater confidence.
Offers/Discounts for Volunteers of Non-Profit
Now that I've set up our non-profit organization with Microsoft's non-profit grant, which includes 10 licenses of Microsoft 365 Business Premium, I'm wondering about what Microsoft 365 discounts are available to volunteers, especially Office software. It's not clear to me what offers/discounts are available for them. Can someone advise?Question for small nonprofits
If you work for a small (5-20 people) nonprofit or charity organisation, what types of information are you capturing using Excel spreadsheets (or paper)? This might include your volunteers, program participants, donors, assets, clients, etc. What other data are you managing? Have you tried finding off-the-shelf solutions to help you with managing it?Nonprofit Power Platform Community Library
Have you created something using the Microsoft Power Platform that you think would be useful for other nonprofits? Many nonprofits are solving similar problems in isolation. That doesn't make much sense when we're all working toward the same goals. I've started a repo on GitHub where we can share open-source, community-built resources with each other. Whether it's a Power BI report highlighting your donors, Power Apps for volunteers, or just a simple Power Automate flow that makes your life easier - this is where we can share, contribute and build on each other's work. This builds on the work already happening through the Microsoft Elevate team - who have been creating solutions based around the Common Data Model for Nonprofits. The goal is to extend that with community-built solutions. Please submit a feature request, start a discussion, or submit your own solutions! You can find the NFP Power Platform Library here: https://github.com/MB-Motive/NFP-Power-Platform-Library
