If you're in the fundraising department of a nonprofit organization leveraging products in the Microsoft ecosystem, the Microsoft Tech for Social Impact team is paving a new road ahead that might be appealing for your organization.

Microsoft recently announced the arrival of Microsoft Fundraising and Engagement, an open source fundraising application built for the non-profit community. This new solution leverages Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Microsoft Azure to bring fundraising tools into the hands of organization in the Microsoft ecosystem. Out-of-the-box, organizations can manage gifts, membership, events, grants, and custom data. Coupled with its broad extensibility features, it gives organizations access to fundraising information nearly anywhere in their use of Microsoft tools, including Outlook, Excel, Word, and Teams.

To top it off, it's free, open source, and built on the open source nonprofit common data model.

As organizations dive into the details of what's included within the new solution (it looks like more will be shared from Microsoft during the next few weeks), we've provided this introductory guide to help you better understand where the Fundraising and Engagement app fits into the broader ecosystem of solutions for our non-profit community.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Nonprofits is a name you're likely to hear very frequently in the nonprofit tech space over the next several years.

As Microsoft's own cloud-based CRM platform, Dynamics for Nonprofits offers a new technology option for organizations of all sizes. If you're already using a range of Microsoft products (or have heard of Microsoft's generous Tech for Social Impact initiative) but haven't yet heard of Dynamics, you're definitely going to want to have it on your radar.

Imagine a world in which all your apps and services worked seamlessly with all the data from your organization. A world in which you could quickly move from one app to another, and still see the same data, sitting gently in the proverbial cloud without time-sucking and soul-crushing imports and exports.

That’s just one of the many data dreams many have had in our sector for decades, and one that could be moving closer (though not completely) into reality.

Microsoft, in collaboration with non-profit organizations and other companies, have been leading an effort to develop the Nonprofit Common Data Model (CDM), with a goal of providing non-profit organizations, technology vendors, and technology consultants one common language to represent key data points and data entities within every non-profit organization.

Considering the huge array of nonprofit organizations, Is this something that could even be built? Even if this is technically feasible, how is it being built, and where can you better understand the benefits this could have for your organization?

We’re going to dive into some of the most common questions we’ve heard about Microsoft’s efforts around the Nonprofit CDM, share our own insights (though, we’re not Microsoft, so this is just our best interpretations), and provide some links to more details.

When your company is worth more than $1,200,000,000,000 (I had to count the number of zeros, just to make sure I had it right), you have a unique opportunity to shape a better world. Some might go as far as to say it’s a responsibility to do so.

But what do you tackle?

Well, if you’re Microsoft, and you can scale the benefits of your services and products around the world, the sky’s the limit! Getting focused, and delivering actual solutions that can be used to do good requires insight and expertise working with those on the front lines. Plus, a good bit of leadership.

It’s no surprise then that Microsoft announced the launch of Microsoft Philanthropies in December 2015 to lead this charge, with among other things a plan to donate $1 billion of the company’s cloud services. Then, in September 2017, Microsoft Philanthropies announced the launch of Microsoft Tech for Social Impact (Microsoft TSI), with a focus to help more nonprofits around the world more fully leverage the power of the cloud.

As we enter 2020, the Microsoft TSI train seems to have picked up steam as the nonprofit community takes notice. But what exactly does Microsoft TSI plan to do?