IT for nonprofits runs on a different budget.
A charity does not buy technology the way a business does. The money arrives as grants that fund projects and not operations, a large part of the software is donated on terms that changed in 2025, and some of the people who need accounts are volunteers who will be gone by spring. That is the actual problem, and it is not a smaller version of anyone else.
Registered charities, incorporated nonprofits and societies across Vancouver Island
- Donated licensing checked before anything is bought
- Work scoped to a funding cycle
- Volunteer accounts that end on the last day
- Everything owned by the organisation
Grants fund projects. They rarely fund operations.
This is the single most important thing to understand about technology in a nonprofit, and it is the thing most IT providers get wrong in the first meeting. A restricted grant pays for a deliverable inside a defined period. It does not pay for a subscription that keeps billing after the reporting deadline. Everything below follows from that one constraint.
Project money cannot quietly become a subscription
A funder will pay for a migration, a network build, a device refresh tied to a program, a security review with a written output. Those are deliverables with an end. The same funder will not pay, out of the same envelope, for a per-seat monthly fee that outlives the project by four years — and the administrative allowance most grants permit is not sized to absorb it either. So the running cost gets named in writing before the application goes in, not discovered at the first renewal. A recurring line that was never applied for has no home in the budget, and the organisation ends up cancelling something it needed rather than something it chose. Scoping around that is the work, and it is the part a provider selling one standard agreement cannot do.
The donated layer comes first
Nothing gets bought until eligibility has been checked. TechSoup Canada, Microsoft for Nonprofits and Google for Nonprofits between them cover a large share of what a small organisation actually runs on, at an administrative fee or at no cost. Buying retail while sitting on an unclaimed entitlement is money a funder will ask about.
Volunteer turnover is an account problem
A business of twenty people offboards a handful of staff a year. An organisation running a season of events may onboard and offboard dozens of volunteers in the same period, many of whom never appear on a payroll record. Nothing tells the system they have gone. The account, the shared folder and the group membership stay open until somebody goes looking.
Donor data sits under BC law, not just federal law
British Columbia's Personal Information Protection Act covers organisations for commercial and non-commercial activity alike. A BC society is therefore in scope for its donor, member and client records for everything it does, which is a wider net than the federal act casts over a charity. Worth knowing before a spreadsheet of donors is emailed to a board member's personal address.
The board is a user group nobody provisioned
Directors turn over on terms, use personal email addresses, hold signing authority, and are frequently the only people who know where something is registered. Minutes in a folder owned by a treasurer who left two years ago is not an unusual finding. It is the normal state of a volunteer board that has never been asked the question.
The grant that went away, and what it did to your budget.
If one thing on this page is worth reading in full, it is this. A large number of Canadian charities built their entire operation on a Microsoft entitlement that no longer exists in the form they remember, and the change lands quietly at a renewal date rather than as an outage.
Until 2025, an eligible nonprofit could receive a grant of Microsoft 365 Business Premium licences at no cost, alongside an Office 365 E1 grant. Microsoft announced in May 2025 that both were being discontinued, with existing licences expiring at each organisation's next renewal date on or after 1 July 2025. That is not a price change. It is the removal of a tier.
What Microsoft continues to offer is a grant of up to 300 Microsoft 365 Business Basic licences, plus discounts of up to 75 percent on many paid nonprofit offers, Business Premium and Office 365 E1 among them. For a lot of organisations that is genuinely enough, and saying so is more useful than selling around it.
The gap is specific and worth naming. Business Basic covers email, Teams, cloud storage and the web and mobile versions of the apps. It does not include the desktop versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, and it does not carry the device management and advanced security tooling that arrived with the Business Premium grant. An organisation whose finance volunteer works in a large Excel workbook offline, or whose staff carry laptops that were being managed centrally, has just lost something it was using.
The part that catches people is that nothing migrates by itself. Microsoft's own guidance is that licences have to be replaced manually in the admin centre before the old subscription cancels, and that the risk of doing nothing is service disruption and data loss. The organisations in trouble are not the ones that made a choice. They are the ones that received a notice, filed it, and are now inside a renewal window.
What this changes about the conversation is the budget category. Security tooling that used to be free is now a discounted operating cost, and operating costs are the line grants fund worst. That is the honest version, and it is why the first question here is what your funding cycle looks like rather than how many seats you have.
Three programs, checked before anything is bought.
Between them these cover most of what a small organisation runs on. Terms move, so what follows describes the category rather than quoting a number that will be wrong by the time you read it. Current eligibility gets checked at the time of the work.
- Donated and discounted software and hardware for an administrative fee well under retail
- Open to registered charities, incorporated nonprofits and public libraries
- Verification of your registration documents is part of signing up
- Each donor partner adds its own restrictions on top of the base eligibility
The first place to look, and the one most often left unclaimed. Check current eligibility and the current catalogue before assuming a product is there.
- A grant of up to 300 Microsoft 365 Business Basic licences for eligible organisations
- Discounts of up to 75 percent on many paid nonprofit offers, Business Premium included
- The Business Premium and Office 365 E1 grants were discontinued at renewals from 1 July 2025
- Licence changes are made manually in the admin centre, and nothing migrates on its own
The grant tier and the discount tier are different things and get confused constantly. Which one you are on decides whether device management is included or billed.
- Core Google Workspace tools at no cost for eligible organisations
- In Canada, a CRA-registered charity or a tax-exempt nonprofit, validated by an external partner
- Hospitals, healthcare organisations, schools and academic institutions are excluded
- A charitable or philanthropic arm of an excluded organisation may still qualify
Also carries an in-kind search advertising program with its own separate approval and its own ongoing account requirements. Check current eligibility for both.
Three kinds of person, three different end dates.
Most businesses have one category of user and one leaving process. A nonprofit has at least three, and only one of them is visible to payroll. This is where the real risk sits, and it costs nothing to fix at the point an account is created.
The volunteer
Arrives for a season, an event or a campaign. May never appear in any system that knows when they stopped. Given a login because it was faster than the alternative, added to a shared drive because that is where the files were. The fix is not a policy document — it is an expiry date set at the moment the account is made, so the default outcome is closure rather than drift.
Provisioned with an end date, not a promise.
The board member
Term-limited, usually on a personal email address, often holding signing authority and sometimes holding the domain registration. Turnover is scheduled and known years ahead, which makes it the easiest handover on this page and the one most reliably missed. Every account, registration and billing relationship belongs in the organisation name with more than one director able to reach it.
Owned by the organisation, reachable by more than one.
The funded contract role
Hired against a specific grant, ending when the funding does. The account should end on the same day the contract does. The work should not — the files, the mailbox contents and the program records belong to the organisation and need somewhere to land before the person goes, not after. That is a fifteen-minute job on the last week and an archaeology project six months later.
Account closes, the record stays.
Governance is not a binder. It is three things being current.
A board carries fiduciary responsibility for an organisation whose technology none of them administer. These are the three artifacts that let a director answer a question honestly at a meeting, and they are also the three a funder or an auditor is most likely to ask about.
- Asset and account register What exists, in whose name, what renews automatically, and on whose card.
- Access, on and off A dated record of who was given what, and the date it ended.
- A restore that happened The date somebody last restored a file, not the date the backup ran.
We do not write your grant application, and we will tell you when there is nothing to sell.
A meaningful number of small societies are already well served by the granted tier and need a two-hour tidy-up rather than an agreement. Saying so costs a sale and is the only defensible position for a page that has just spent five hundred words on how tight your budget is. Fundraising platforms, donor CRMs and grant writing are not on offer here, and the right advice on those is usually to ask another organisation your size what they actually use.
Before we start
The six questions that come up every time, answered the same way here as on the phone.
How do we know if we qualify for donated software?
In Canada the usual bar is a registered charity, an incorporated nonprofit or a public library, and each donor partner adds its own restrictions on top of that — a program you qualify for as an organisation can still exclude your specific activity. It gets checked against your actual registration before anything is quoted or bought, because the answer changes what the rest of the plan costs.
Microsoft used to give us Business Premium for free. What happened?
Microsoft discontinued the Microsoft 365 Business Premium grant and the Office 365 E1 grant, effective at each organisation's next renewal on or after 1 July 2025. What remains is a grant of up to 300 Microsoft 365 Business Basic licences plus discounts of up to 75 percent on many paid nonprofit offers, Business Premium included. Nothing migrates by itself, so an organisation that did nothing is the one at risk.
Can a small society run entirely on the free tier?
Often, yes. Mail, files, meetings and the shared calendar are all covered by the granted tier for most organisations under a few dozen people. The honest gaps are the desktop versions of the Office apps and the device management and security tooling that used to arrive with the Business Premium grant. Whether those gaps matter depends on what data you hold, not on how many staff you have.
Our funding is a grant that ends in eighteen months. Can you work with that?
Yes, and it changes the shape of the work rather than ruling it out. Project-shaped work with a start and an end fits a grant. A recurring monthly cost does not, unless it was named in the application before it went in. So the running cost gets written down early enough to be applied for, which is the part that usually does not happen.
Who owns the accounts if our executive director leaves?
The organisation, in every case, and that is worth checking before you need the answer. The tenant, the domain registration, the billing relationship and the administrator role all belong in the society's name with more than one director able to reach them. A domain registered to a former staff member's personal account is the single most common finding in a nonprofit handover.
Does privacy law apply to us? We are not a business.
In British Columbia, yes. BC's Personal Information Protection Act covers organisations for commercial and non-commercial activity alike, so a BC society is in scope for its donor, member and client records regardless of whether money changed hands. The federal law works differently — its trigger is commercial activity, which it defines to include selling, bartering or leasing donor or membership lists. This is a description of the landscape, not legal advice.
Tell us what your funding cycle looks like.
The renewal date, what the current grant covers, and what happens to the technology when it ends. We will tell you what is claimable, what is already covered, and what actually needs buying.
info@valleyedgeconsulting.io · 778-488-8618