Before the pandemic, the thousands of veteran US military volunteers who make up the nonprofit Team Rubicon would be called in to help after hurricanes, earthquakes and other natural disasters. Now, they are involved in one of the most logistically challenging peacetime ventures the United States has ever faced: the coronavirus vaccination program.
Administering vaccines to millions of people across the country is a huge task. The Rubicon Team has been using Microsoft technology to bring volunteers together in a way that previously it was not possible to ensure that people in the U.S. have better access to the Covid-19 vaccine.
Microsoft today announced its Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofits and its plans to develop solutions for common nonprofit scenarios, such as Team Rubicon, that can be enhanced through technology. With fewer resources and less funding because of the pandemic, greater efficiency is essential. The Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofits is designed to meet the needs of nonprofits and further accelerate the reach and scale of their work. This is part of the company’s broadest cloud ad in the industry.
We spoke with Justin Spelhaug, who heads Microsoft’s Tech for Social Impact, to learn more. His team, within Microsoft Philanthropies, provides nonprofits with affordable technology, services and training to help them advance their missions. It is this team, together with Microsoft partners, that will help to deploy Microsoft Cloud for nonprofits around the world.
Justin, will you show us Microsoft Cloud technology for nonprofits
In the past few years, we have worked side by side with the nonprofit sector, including organizations like Team Rubicon, to identify the most common scenarios these organizations face. Every time nonprofits took on a technology project, they had to reinvent the wheel because of the lack of solutions created for their challenges. So by building industry-specific solutions and investing in a common data model, we can help eliminate friction from the equation for nonprofits. It becomes easier, faster and cheaper for nonprofits to adopt modern digital technology and allows them to focus more on their missions.
Specifically, we are bringing together the power of Microsoft 365, Power Platform, Dynamics 365, Azure and LinkedIn. This will make engagement and fundraising, team collaboration, volunteer engagement and management, and program design and delivery more efficient. In addition, the Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofits is underpinned by a common data model for nonprofits, making it easier and less expensive for nonprofits to integrate with existing solutions and share data across the organization .
In late 2020, we launched our first solution, which is now within the Microsoft Cloud for nonprofits, called Fundraising and Engagement. It supports common fundraising needs across all types and channels of donation, including: major and annual donations; recurring gift and partner programs; opportunity management and assignment; and management of home and life events. Fundraising and engagement is based on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise.
There is more innovation to come, including new solutions to boost volunteer engagement and management. Volunteers are at the heart of many nonprofits and it is essential that they are deployed and supported in the most effective way possible.
Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofits represents a long-term commitment to innovate for the nonprofit sector, providing the technology that nonprofits need to address the industry’s most pressing challenges so they can accomplish more.
[READ MORE: How technology is propelling nonprofits through a crisis to help even more people in need]
Because is technology so important for delivering essential services during the pandemic?
Covid-19 is widening inequalities in our communities and around the world. As the demand for nonprofit services increases significantly, resources and financing become more restricted. For many nonprofits, there has never been so much pressure to find ways to do more with less – scale up their operations, improve efficiency and protect data from their beneficiaries and donors. Microsoft’s cloud for nonprofits is positioned to play an important role in addressing this pressure and unlocking new opportunities for nonprofits by addressing the most urgent scenarios on a highly secure and unified platform supported by a global partner ecosystem .
What can Cloud for Nonprofit do for groups like Team Rubicon?
I volunteered with Team Rubicon in Iowa in 2019, helping to support communities that were flooded during the great flood in the Midwest. We spent days cleaning houses of water, mud and debris so that the owners could begin the process of rebuilding their lives. I experienced the very real human impact that Team Rubicon volunteers cause every day.
While support for the Midwest flood was a major operation, Team Rubicon’s effort to mobilize more than one million volunteers to provide support for Covid-19 vaccinations is much larger and more complex. Vaccine implantation is a complicated operation that involves logistics, combination of skills and tasks and administration of vaccination sites. There are a lot of moving parts on a large scale, and it’s just not something you can do with just a piece of paper and a spreadsheet. Bringing order and structure to this complexity is where technology comes in. The Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofits will help the Rubicon Team to get involved, plan and manage voluntary operations to support this vaccination effort.
What is the role of partners in the Microsoft Cloud for nonprofits?
The Microsoft partner ecosystem has been with us every step of the way to leverage that foundation and develop even more solutions for nonprofits. We have partners like Avanade, Wipfli, threshold.world and Soapbox Engage that are already creating solutions around the Microsoft Cloud for non-profit organizations. These solutions are aligned with the common data model for nonprofit organizations. In addition, we have partners who have served the sector for decades. Our strategic partnership with Blackbaud has enabled continuous innovation in connecting our platforms and brings its industry-leading analytics and fundraising solutions to the industry, leveraging the Microsoft cloud – from Azure to integration with Power Apps and the Microsoft productivity suite 365. These partners provide nonprofits with a broad portfolio of solutions and resources that can meet industry needs and can be adopted over time.
Is the Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofits available to organizations worldwide?
Microsoft Cloud components for nonprofits, such as the Fundraising and Engagement solution, are now available. New fundraising and engagement resources will be launched in April 2021, including rapid donation management and payment processing resources, constituent research provided by LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and proactive insights to improve constituent engagement. Additional tools, Volunteer Engagement and Volunteer Management, will be on public display in late June and generally available in the second half of 2021. All of these solutions will be supported globally and will be located in the near future.
We are already seeing its value globally. Right to Play, an organization with projects around the world that uses games and sports to empower children, was one of the first to adopt the Fundraising and Engagement solution. This enables the organization to use analytics to attract and retain donors with more targeted campaigns. This is a crucial tool for non-profit organizations that face funding challenges during the pandemic.
Since implementing the platform two years ago, Right to Play has increased its number of monthly donors by 3,000% in the Canadian market alone. They also reduced the time to produce fundraising reports from one day to one minute, using the solution’s automation. For Right to Play, this has been a crucial building block to help them grow to support millions of the world’s most vulnerable children who now need more support than ever before.
[READ MORE: More tech and cloud support for nonprofits on the frontline of Covid-19]
What is the next?
In the short term, we are really focused on delivering against that. But technology is only part of the solution. We are working to ensure that nonprofits have the services and training they need to democratize data, drive platform usage and advance their mission during this incredibly challenging period. That said, we are only scratching the surface of the power of technology in this sector. The potential for making a positive impact through technology is great, and we are just getting started.
Sign up to stay up to date at Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofits. And join us on March 30 to Introducing Microsoft Cloud to Nonprofits, a digital event where you will learn about this industry specific solution, see a demonstration of the new features in Fundraising and Engagement, listen to news from nonprofits and have the opportunity to ask questions of Microsoft experts.