There is good value in attaining Non-Profit Status with Microsoft (MS) as they, Microsoft, provide such organization with some generous offerings, such as free or reduced price subscriptions to their products for a period of 10 years or longer. One such free offering is Office365 E1 where in one is provided with cloud storage (OneDrive) of 1Tb as well as web-access to MS office products among other offerings.
To attain such status, one will follow this link below and provide the requested documentation:
Microsoft Non-Profit Portal
Microsoft also refers one to a third party called “Techsoup” that handles all other its offerings except the web-based Microsoft environment. Techsoup, similarly request for the same documentation. They are found: Techsoup Portal
They require payments to be made through Western Union.
In preparation to engage the MS environment and its offerings into your organization, it is suggested that:
1. Domain Name: Acquire a specific domain name that will serve this new environment offered by Microsoft, eg myorganisation.org Without such a domain name, Microsoft assigns a very long identifier as your environment link. A short identifier, using your specific domain, is much easier to work with.
2. System Administrator: Designate a person with some IT ability. He/she needs to have a valid credit card (despite that many offerings are free - one has to “buy” the no cost offerings). It’s advisable that System Administrator doesn’t allocate any resources to him/herself but to create another user of which the System Administrator allocates resources and uses it as his/her own. The System Administrator not only “buys” these free resources but he/she creates users and allocates resources to each user.
3. Internet Provider: Choose an Internet provider that will handle an increase demand on bandwidth due to the heavier reliance on web-based applications.
Once the MS account is established, your System Administrator will allocate resources to users who will then, via the web and the OneDrive portal, tap into MS office 365 and related applications.
Another benefit for Non-Profits is that MS suggests referrals to local MS partners that can assist in providing other MS products at reduced prices.