More Microsoft Clouds for Industries, Including Nonprofits

by James Townsend

Today Microsoft announced three new industry computing clouds for financial, manufacturing and nonprofit. The new clouds join the healthcare and retail clouds.

Based on Azure, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Power Platform and other Microsoft services, the industry clouds consolidate components, tools, solutions, and data models that are geared toward industry needs and standards.

Since my focus is public sector, I am most interested in the nonprofit cloud among these three new clouds.

According to Justin Spelhaug, who leads Tech for Social Impact at Microsoft, "Specifically, we are bringing together the power of Microsoft 365, Power Platform, Dynamics 365, Azure and LinkedIn. This will make engagement and fundraising, staff collaboration, volunteer engagement and management, and program design and delivery more efficient. In addition, Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit 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."

The nonprofit cloud builds on the Microsoft nonprofit solution accelerator as well as the fundraising and engagement solution which contain data models and templates for Dynamics 365 / Power Apps. The Common Data Model is an effort to create a de facto standard to simplify integration of applications across products and vendors. Some of the data model is derived from government and nongovernmental organization standards that are relevant to nonprofits.

When you combine the intellectual property that Microsoft is creating and funding through Microsoft implementation partners with the free and discounted software offered by Microsoft to charities and other nonprofits, Microsoft is developing a rich ecosystem of software solutions that can work together for the nonprofit sector.

Learn more from this session at Microsoft Ignite:

Microsoft 365 for Nonprofits: Software Grants

Introducing Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit

Microsoft unveils three more 'industry clouds' for financial, manufacturing and nonprofit

What does the cloud have to do with philanthropy? A Q&A with Justin Spelhaug on helping nonprofits with digital transformation

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