IT for nonprofits, built to outlast the grant.
Grants fund projects, not operations. Much of the software is donated on terms that changed in 2025, and some of the people who need accounts are volunteers gone by spring. We plan the technology around all three, so it keeps running after the funding period ends.
Registered charities, incorporated nonprofits and societies across Vancouver Island
- Sign-in blocked, all sessions revoked9:14 am
- Mailbox converted to shared, office manager given access9:16 am
- Licence removed, back in the pool9:21 am
- Donated licensing checked before anything is bought
- Work scoped to your funding cycle
- Volunteer accounts that close on the last day
- Everything in the organisation's name
Grants fund projects. They rarely fund operations.
This is the most important fact about technology in a nonprofit. A restricted grant pays for a deliverable inside a set period. It does not pay for a subscription that keeps billing after the reporting deadline. Everything below follows from that.
Project money cannot quietly become a subscription
A funder will pay for a migration, a network build, a device refresh tied to a program, or a security review with a written output. Those are deliverables with an end. The same funder will not pay for a per-seat monthly fee that outlives the project by four years, and the administrative allowance in most grants is not sized for it either. So we name the running cost in writing before the application goes in. A recurring cost nobody applied for has no home in the budget, and the organisation ends up cancelling something it needed.
The donated layer comes first
Nothing gets bought until eligibility is checked. TechSoup Canada, Microsoft for Nonprofits and Google for Nonprofits together cover much of what a small organisation runs on, at an administrative fee or free. Buying retail while an entitlement sits unclaimed is money a funder will ask about.
Volunteer turnover is an account problem
A business of twenty offboards a handful of staff a year. An organisation running a season of events may bring on and release dozens of volunteers, many never on payroll. Nothing tells the system they have left, so the account, the shared folder and the group membership stay open until someone 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 in scope for its donor, member and client records across everything it does, a wider net than the federal act casts over a charity. Worth knowing before a donor spreadsheet goes to a board member's personal email.
The board is a user group nobody provisioned
Directors turn over on terms, use personal email, hold signing authority, and are often the only people who know where something is registered. Minutes in a folder owned by a treasurer who left two years ago is a normal finding on a volunteer board. We fix it as part of setup.
The grant that went away, and what it did to your budget.
If you read one section in full, read this one. Many Canadian charities built their operation on a Microsoft entitlement that no longer exists in the form they remember, and the change arrives 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 still offers 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 plenty of organisations that is enough, and we will say so.
The gap is specific. Business Basic covers email, Teams, cloud storage and the web and mobile apps. It leaves out the desktop versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, and the device management and security tooling that came with the Business Premium grant. An organisation whose finance volunteer works offline in a large Excel workbook, or whose laptops were managed centrally, has just lost something it was using.
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 doing nothing risks service disruption and data loss. The organisations in trouble are the ones that received a notice, filed it, and are now inside a renewal window.
What changes 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 why our first question is what your funding cycle looks like, before how many seats you have.
Three programs, checked before anything is bought.
Together these cover most of what a small organisation runs on. Terms move, so this describes each program rather than quoting a number that will be stale by the time you read it. We check current eligibility when the work starts.
TechSoup Canada
- 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.
Microsoft for Nonprofits
- 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.
Google for Nonprofits
- 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 kind of user and one leaving process. A nonprofit has at least three, and payroll sees only one. This is where the real risk sits, and it costs nothing to fix at the moment an account is created.
The volunteer
Arrives for a season, an event or a campaign, and may never appear in any system that knows when they stopped. Given a login because it was faster, added to a shared drive because that is where the files were. The fix is an expiry date set when the account is made, so the default outcome is closure.
Provisioned with an end date, not a promise.
The board member
Term-limited, usually on personal email, often holding signing authority and sometimes the domain registration. Turnover is known years ahead, which makes it the easiest handover on this page and the one most reliably missed. Every account, registration and billing relationship goes in the organisation's name, reachable by more than one director.
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 the same day. The work should stay: files, mailbox contents and program records belong to the organisation and need somewhere to land before the person goes. That takes fifteen minutes in the last week and months of digging later.
Account closes, the record stays.
Governance is not a binder. It is three things being current.
A board carries fiduciary responsibility for technology none of its directors administer. These three records let a director answer honestly at a meeting, and they are the three a funder or auditor is most likely to ask for. We keep them current.
- Asset and account registerWhat exists, in whose name, what renews automatically, and on whose card.
- Access, on and offA dated record of who was given what, and the date it ended.
- A restore that happenedThe date somebody last restored a file, not the date the backup ran.
We do not write grant applications, and we will tell you when you need nothing.
Plenty of small societies are already well served by the granted tier and need a two-hour tidy-up, not an agreement. When that is you, we say so. Fundraising platforms, donor CRMs and grant writing are outside what we do; ask an 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. A program you qualify for as an organisation can still exclude a specific activity. We check 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 a shared calendar are covered by the granted tier for most organisations under a few dozen people. The real gaps are the desktop Office apps and the device management and security tooling that used to come with the Business Premium grant. Whether those matter depends on the data you hold, not your headcount.
Our funding is a grant that ends in eighteen months. Can you work with that?
Yes. It shapes the work rather than ruling it out. Project work with a start and an end fits a grant. A recurring monthly cost does not, unless it was named in the application. So we write the running cost down early enough to be applied for.
Who owns the accounts if our executive director leaves?
The organisation, every time, and we check it before you need the answer. The tenant, the domain registration, the billing relationship and the administrator role all belong in the society's name, reachable by more than one director. A domain registered to a former staff member's personal account is the 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 whether or not money changed hands. The federal law turns on commercial activity, which it defines to include selling, bartering or leasing donor or membership lists. This is a general description of the law, not legal advice.
Tell us your funding cycle.
The renewal date, what the current grant covers, and what happens to the technology when it ends. We come back with what is claimable, what is already covered, and what actually needs buying.
Book a call