How Non-Profits Can Save Money In Tough Times

These are tough times for the non-profit sector. The cost of living crisis has led to a squeeze on everyone’s income and an inevitable reduction in vital donations.

It’s never been truer that every penny counts and, with so many people needing the services of charities in these difficult days, it is vital for them to find ways to reduce costs.

We work with a number of charities and non-profit organisations. Not the huge ones like the British Heart Foundation or Cancer Research UK, with thousands of staff, who are more like corporations.

We support a number of small and medium sized non-profits, those with 20 to 100 staff, and believe there are a number of ways for them to cut down on IT spending, and increase their efficiency at the same time.

The "Over Selling" issue

There are some key issues here: Many get sold various non-profit add-ons for Microsoft Dynamics 365 by the larger Dynamics Parters, a number of whom specialise in the Non-Profit sector, but for smaller non-profits add-on products & services are costsly, and completely unnecessary.

The non-profit gets the full kitchen sink of services and the price seems to simply run away: large set-up fees, plus ongoing monthly fees for both the first-party Dynamics 365 apps, plus the add-ons, which are really not required.

In reality, most SME non-profits don’t need the first party Dynamics 365 apps; they don’t need the Dynamics 365 Sales, Customer Service or Field Service apps, as they don’t operate in that way.

What they really need are Account & Contact Management functionality, along with custom records to hold their customer data. These sorts of systems can be built using model-driven Microsoft Power Apps, at a fraction of the cost. Model-driven Power Apps are still built on the Dynamics 365 CRM platform, so the general platform capabilities are still available, but the ongoing running costs are significantly reduced.

Charities don’t tend to have the same sales funnel process that most commercial businesses do, as they are not tracking Leads to Opportunities, to Quotes, to Orders in the same way. It is much more about relationship building, working with friends of the charity, and sponsor companies & organisations.

Even though non-profits get a signficicant reduction in licenses fees from Microsoft [Plus a grant of five free Dynamics 365 CRM licenses and ten free Power Apps licenses] there is still a big difference in what they need to be paying.

A Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise license is ￡78.10 a month, but with a non-profit discount, they could be paying “only” ￡19.50 a month.

But just think that a Power Apps per app license would only cost ￡2.10 a month with the non-profit discount – on top of the grant of 10 free Power Apps licenses.

Spending ￡19 versus ￡2 a month per license makes a big difference to a small charity that needs to save money. A charity with 50 staff would be saving around ￡10,400 a year, a significant sum.

And Power Apps can be used to build exactly what the non-profit requires, rather than the generic functionality of a non-profit add-on that has been sold to them.

Our suggestion is to come and have a chat with us, and get a review of what you are using and whether you need to have all that expense for tech that is not useful.