Securely run and grow your organisation with the Microsoft 365 Business Donation Offer for Non-profits

As many of you may be aware, Microsoft have introduced their Tech for Social Impact (TSI) Team who are dedicated to supporting organisations in the non-profit sector on their journey towards digital transformation.

However, for many of our customers in this sector it is not always clear as to how they can leverage some of the non-profit offers from Microsoft in order to support their cloud strategies.

Over the last couple of years Microsoft have offered those in this sector:

  • $3,500 credit in their Azure tenancy
  • Office 365 E1 licences free of charge
  • Office 365 Business Essentials free of charge

As part of their ongoing donations program, Microsoft have now announced that they are also providing:

Ben Murden
Ben Murden

Ben has over two decades in the IT industry, delivering both online and offline campaigns across all platforms to meet business goals and objectives. Joining Phoenix in 1999 as a graphic designer, Ben has evolved over the years into a fully-rounded marketing professional, before being promoted to Phoenix Marketing Manager early in 2018, reporting directly to the MD. With his background in creative design, Ben takes projects from inception to execution and can identify the correct strategy based on the subject, audience, and goals – while increasing the brand profile and revenue. His passion for digital marketing is evident in everything he does, and both vendors and strategic partners often comment on his incredibly positive attitude to ‘make things happen’.

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10 x Microsoft 365 (M365) Business licences free of charge

M365 is a suite of products that includes Office 365, EMS and Windows 10. While many will be aware of Office 365 and Windows 10, for some organisations EMS is a licence that they have not come across before. The Enterprise Mobility + Security suite provides:

  • Azure Active Directory Premium for Multi-Factor Authentication and Single Sign-On capabilities
  • InTune for Mobile Application and Mobile Device Management
  • Azure Information Protection for classifying the sensitivity of documents across the Office stack

The release of the M365 Business donation licences from Microsoft means that non-profits can now run small-scale proof of concepts (with no licensing costs to the business) to determine how they could transition from their existing environment to Microsoft’s cloud-based solutions. By using each of the components in this suite, users can start to collaborate and increase productivity in a secure way. The M365 Business donation licences can help your organisation to:

Build your organisation

Work better together

Get more done

Safeguard your organisation

Simplified for you

Build stronger volunteer and beneficiary relationships and increase beneficiary reach by improving the efficiency of your organisation. Collaborate, share, and communicate with flexible tools that go where your team goes. Bring all your teams and resources into one place and work anywhere from any device. Increase productivity with intelligent tools built into the Office you love along with enterprise-grade email and file storage. Access all your files from virtually anywhere and work efficiently with integration with other apps and solutions you use daily. Help protect your non-profit against external threats and data leaks with built-in privacy compliance tools. Apply customisable data loss prevention policies to protect data while allowing the right employees to access the right data across multiple devices and platforms. Easily set up and manage your users, devices, and data, giving you more time to focus on your business. Standardise your security with easy toggles and preconfigured policies.

 

In the coming days, Microsoft will be communicating this offer to their customers, and although they now have a dedicated team of resources that customers can call upon, they rely heavily on trusted partners in their network to support them in delivering solutions of this nature. Subsequently, customers will be directed to the Microsoft Partner Center where they will be able to search for partners across Microsoft’s network based on the criteria of their choosing and then select the one that they feel is most aligned to their business aims.

With 30 years’ experience in the sector, and as Microsoft’s Global Modern Workplace Partner of the Year 2019, Phoenix has appeared in a large proportion of these searches; as our expertise in deploying solutions across the Microsoft stack continues to expand after immense investments were put in place many years ago to assist the charity sector to take advantage of cloud technology from Microsoft

Learn more with our short on-demand webinar
Phoenix is a long-standing Trusted Supplier and strategic partner of NCVO, their understanding of the charity world and the needs of charities and voluntary organisations is second to none. Phoenix provide invaluable insight, advice and support to NCVO members and the wider charity sector but also help organisations to stay abreast of a rapidly changing technology and digital environment. A range of innovative projects and satisfied customers speaks volumes for their quality of service they have delivered, notably around transformation. NCVO is proud to work with Phoenix to support charities in transforming themselves to meet their beneficiary need, and is regarded as a high impact organisation driving themes of accessibility and digital inclusion - quite simply the remarkable work that Phoenix is undertaking within the charity sector is improving people’s lives
Richard Williams Director of Enterprise & Development, NCVO

Our experience has shown that while there is often an appetite to streamline processes and work in a more agile manner, it can be challenging for a project to be taken on when the total cost of ownership for the end solution is unknown and when in-house resource is limited.

Phoenix have therefore developed a range of services and assessments, many of which are free of charge, to assist our customers on the road to digital transformation. By starting with the M365 Business licence donation, we can provide bespoke assistance to help our customers leverage each element of the product suite.

For those at the beginning of this journey, we would typically recommend a Customer Immersion Experience (CIE). This is a non-technical, interactive workshop designed to evangelise the functionalities within Office 365 and show users the art of the possible. We can then, if required, progress on to a Technical Workshop to discuss at a low-level what requirements and priorities each of our customers has and then determine a migration path in order to hit these objectives.

Given the knowledge that we then have of each of our customer’s environments, based on the initial assessments, we are very well placed to offer support (or fully manage) the migration of services from on-premise solutions across to Exchange, Sharepoint, One Drive and Teams. Post-migration we can assist with Managed Services and Support agreements to all customers that are backed by our in-house Consultancy Team in partnership with Microsoft via our Premier Support Agreement.

Moreover, we have provided a number of our customers with a ‘Monitor’ assessment which is designed to address our customers’ concerns around the imminent end of support for Windows 7 and ultimately help determine a tailored strategy and delivery plan for the journey towards Windows 10.

Finally, to ensure that these solutions are deployed in a secure and compliant manner, we have several security assessments designed to highlight where existing solutions are working well, but also pinpoint areas that may require remediation to better protect your organisation. Depending on the nature of any ‘gaps’ in the network security, we can look to leverage the capabilities of EMS that are included in the donation offering and for any areas that this cannot address we can recommend alternative solutions. Increasingly, we are noticing conversations in this space progress from traditional endpoint and gateway security, through to more granular requirements around NIS Directives, Breach Management services, Cyber Essentials (and CE+) and a plethora of other areas relating to compliance and data governance.

In all cases, Phoenix are well placed to engage in an agnostic conversation relating to each of our customer’s requirements in this space. We tailor each discussion, pilot and project to hit the business objectives of each customer and use our strong partnership with Microsoft to help deliver these in the most cost-effective manner by taking full advantage of donation programs such as these.

OUR EXPERTISE + MICROSOFT 365 BUSINESS = YOUR SUCCESS

We have the expertise you need to bring the benefits of digital transformation to your non-profit organisation. We know Microsoft 365 Business and with the new Microsoft 365 Business for non-profits offer, your organisation will have the technology to achieve its mission and drive real-world impact. Your employees and volunteers (unpaid full-time equivalent [FTE] staff) will have access to powerful tools that help them work better together and get more done, while your organisation is protected by the latest security.

You can expect expert recommendations, guidance and best practices for streamlining operations, increasing collaboration and productivity and strengthening security with a simple, cost-effective solution.

Talk to a member of the Phoenix Charities/Non-Profit Team today on 01904 562200, email [email protected] or fill in the form below: