Microsoft 365 + Azure for Nonprofits
Summary
Microsoft for Nonprofits unlocks two flagship offers: Microsoft 365 Business Basic free for up to 300 users, and the Azure sponsorship grant ($2,000/yr in Azure credits, no rollover). The free Business Premium / Office 365 E1 grant was retired 1 July 2025; Business Basic remains free and Premium/E1 sit at roughly 75% off. Eligibility follows TechSoup / country partners and explicitly excludes political organisations and organisations whose primary purpose is influencing legislation.
Body
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/nonprofits/
The current Microsoft 365 for Nonprofits offer, after the July 2025 restructure, is Business Basic free for up to 300 users (the basic cloud productivity tier: web/mobile Office apps, Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint, Exchange) plus roughly 75% off Business Premium and Office 365 E1 for organisations that need the desktop apps and the security/management stack [source: microsoft-nonprofits]. The free Premium/E1 grant that existed in prior years was retired on 1 July 2025; new offers follow the Basic-free + Premium-discount structure [source: microsoft-nonprofits].
Separately, Microsoft operates the Azure sponsorship grant — $2,000 USD per year in Azure credits, no rollover between years — for eligible nonprofits through microsoft.com/en-us/nonprofits/azure. The grant amount was reduced from the historical $3,500 to the current $2,000 figure [source: microsoft-nonprofits].
Eligibility for both M365 and Azure is gated by Microsoft for Nonprofits, which uses TechSoup and country partners as the validator. The exclusion list mirrors TechSoup’s: political organisations, organisations whose primary purpose is influencing legislation, governmental organisations, labour organisations, business leagues, chambers of commerce, social clubs, and schools/universities (which have separate Microsoft Education programs) are not eligible [source: microsoft-nonprofits]. Religious organisations are eligible if they have a secular community-facing program.
Use it for
Procuring free Microsoft 365 Business Basic for up to 300 seats (the workhorse productivity stack for a small-medium advocacy org); planning an Azure pilot (the $2k/yr grant is enough for one or two small VMs and a managed database); deciding whether to apply given your organisation’s primary-purpose test (the answer is no for partisan/electoral orgs, yes for non-partisan charitable orgs doing some advocacy).
Related
- civic-tech
- digital-security
- distributed-organizing
- framing-and-narrative
- petitions-and-e-campaigning
Learn more
- On Wikipedia: Microsoft — CC BY-SA 4.0